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Orleans. (Photo by Cheryl Gerber/Getty Images) J.C. Watts, Jr. a former Republican congressman, is expected to endorse Newt Gingrich for president imminently. NBC News is reporting that Gingrich will secure the former Oklahoma representative's endorsement in an announcement that is likely to be made later today. Watts was elected to Congress in 1994, becoming the first African-American to win a statewide office in Oklahoma. Gingrich is famously credited with leading Republicans that election year to winning control of the House for the first time in 40 years, according to the New York Times. Gingrich then served as Speaker of the...

Newt Gingrich is planning a new wave of television ads in Iowa this week that will kick off an air campaign running through the Jan. 3 caucuses, a political media-buying source tells POLITICO. Gingrich has been conspicuously light on the Iowa airwaves since his campaign surge started late last month, and his polling numbers have taken a hit as his opponents – chiefly Ron Paul and the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future – have battered him through paid media. He released a commercial last week responding to the onslaught by saying: "We want and deserve solutions. Others seem to...

In the face of attack ads casting Newt Gingrich as less than a true conservative - spots that may be eroding his support - a super PAC supporting Gingrich has released a new spot deeming the former House Speaker a "proven conservative leader." The spot, from the newly-formed Winning Our Future, is not officially affiliated with the Gingrich campaign, and it cannot coordinate with the campaign. But like many super PACs, it has strong ties to the candidate. Winning Our Future is led by Becky Burkett, a onetime official with a now-defunct group American Solutions for Winning the Future that...

I on Newt by John Taylor The impression I have of GOP dynamics at the moment is that many conservative activists fear nothing more than Mitt Romney's election. In a second term, President Obama would be a lame duck almost immediately. A President Romney would marginalize conservatives with business-friendly, relatively moderate policies appealing to a congressional coalition of center-right Republicans and centrist Democrats. To avert the wholesale reinvention (some would say restoration) of what it means to be a mainstream Republican, activists backed Palin, then Bachmann, Perry, and Cain. Intentionally or not, they're now flirting with the unthinkable: Nominating...

Newt Gingrich has proposed many solutions to the ever growing power of our courts. Power that has surpassed the other two branches of government: Kelly: You have proposed a plan to subpoena judges to testify before Congress about controversial decisions that they make. In certain cases, you advocate impeaching judges or abolishing courts altogether. Two conservative former attorneys general have criticized your plan, saying it alters the checks and balances of the three branches of government. And they used words like “dangerous,” “outrageous,” and “totally irresponsible.” Are they wrong? Gingrich: Well, the first half is right. It alters the...

Newt Gingrich's campaign is rapidly imploding, and Ron Paul has now taken the lead in Iowa. He's at 23% to 20% for Mitt Romney, 14% for Gingrich, 10% each for Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann, and Rick Perry, 4% for Jon Huntsman, and 2% for Gary Johnson. Gingrich has now seen a big drop in his Iowa standing two weeks in a row. His share of the vote has gone from 27% to 22% to 14%. And there's been a large drop in his personal favorability numbers as well from +31 (62/31) to +12 (52/40) to now -1 (46/47). Negative ads...

It is one of the true delights of a bizarrely entertaining Republican presidential contest to watch the apoplectic fear and loathing of so many GOP establishmentarians toward Newt Gingrich. They treat him as an alien body whose approach to politics they have always rejected. In fact, Gingrich’s rise is the revenge of a Republican base that takes seriously the intense hostility to President Obama, the incendiary accusations against liberals and the Manichaean division of the world between an “us” and a “them” that his party has been peddling in the interest of electoral success. The right-wing faithful knows Gingrich pioneered...

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — Just a year ago, tea party activists came roaring out of the congressional elections eager to shape the looming race for the White House. Things have not gone as planned. Turned off by Mitt Romney's style and evolution on several important issues, they have bounced from one candidate to another in hopes of finding a formidable alternative to the former Massachusetts governor to focus their enthusiasm. After a series of disappointments — Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, and businessman Herman Cain among them — the anti-establishment movement has settled, for now, on a...

Mitt Romney, making a direct appeal to middle class voters, said this morning that he would be a president who would protect average Americans – a statement that is sure to be challenged by Democrats and will become a major theme in the general election if Romney wins the nomination. “The people who have been hurt in the Obama economy are not the wealthy, the wealthy are doing just fine,” Romney said this morning on Fox News Sunday. “The people that have been hurt are people in the middle class.” In a wide-ranging interview with Chris Wallace – his first...

Newt Gingrich has injected a controversial new proposition to the Republican presidential contest—asserting that as president he would rein in the judiciary—while Mitt Romney appeared Sunday to nudge his campaign toward the political center, as the two GOP front-runners pursued very different tacks in their closing arguments to Iowa voters. Mr. Gingrich, in a sign of his willingness to gamble on new campaign themes ahead of Iowa's Jan. 3 caucuses, launched a broad attack on an "increasingly arrogant" federal judiciary, proposing to impeach certain judges and even abolish courts that in his view overstepped their authority. The move showed the...

GOP presidential frontrunner Newt Gingrich said Congress has the power to dispatch the Capitol Police or U.S. Marshals to apprehend a federal judge who renders a decision lawmakers broadly oppose... Gingrich made his remarks during a Sunday appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation” where he defended his position that the president has the power to eliminate federal courts to disempower judges who hand down decisions out of step with the rest of the nation...

I am fed up with the RINO leaders of the Republican Party. You know who you are. Just tell me who you want to be the Republican Flag bearer. The one you want to fall with the flag. Let me know. I want to know so I can vote for someone else. Is it Romney? That almost seems to be the only guy you have left. I am not a Newt fan. He has made some bad mistakes. I don't think he is as brilliant as some say. Yeah, he has his sexual misconducts. I hate that. I have stayed...

Evangelicals play a significant role in the Iowa electorate. In 2008 they overwhelmingly voted for Mike Huckabee. Huckabee is perceived by many as having won the vote by living and campaigning in Iowa exclusively and speaking to many churches and church groups prior to the caucuses. Many Iowans may also have voted for him because he was a Baptist minister. Iowans were impressed for sure. But it was not enough to propel him to the nomination. In fact by the time the process rolled around to Florida, the Huckabee share of voters was only 13%. For this election cycle, evangelicals...

<p>Did Palin just call Newt and Mitt RINOs? It sure sounds like it.</p>

Republican president hopeful Newt Gingrich doubled down on his criticism of federal judges and the Supreme Court on Sunday as chief rival Mitt Romney defended his record against likely Democratic attacks. With close to two weeks before GOP voters start choosing their nominee, Gingrich is courting the conservative primary voters he will need to win in Iowa and sustain his campaign against Romney, whose superior organization and pile of cash has him seeming ever more confident as he looks ahead to the general election. "There is steady encroachment of secularism through the courts to redefine America as a nonreligious country...

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Sunday that he's "delighted" the Des Moines Register endorsed his opponent Mitt Romney. "The Manchester Union Leader, which is a reliably conservative newspaper, endorsed me," he told Bob Schieffer on "Face the Nation." "The Des Moines Register, which is a solidly liberal newspaper did not endorse me." He said those endorsements indicate who the "real conservative" in the race is.

An M.D. at the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (leaders in the fight against HillaryCare and now ObamaCare) points out that Newt Gingrich helped to stop HillaryCare, only to turn around and implement many of its features later on. Newt Gingrich and other Republicans promise to repeal ObamaCare, but doctors remember what they did in 1996. Just after they “defeated” ClintonCare, they changed its name and enacted the very worst parts of it. more He'll betray us again if he's president. Gingrich is a big government statist. Only a fool would think this zebra has changed its stripes.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- In mid-1970 an unusual job application landed in the stack of resumes at West Georgia College. A young man finishing up his Ph.D. and looking for his first teaching job ditched the standard resume-and-cover-letter approach and instead wrote about his travels abroad, what it meant to grow up as the son of an Army colonel, the 100-plus books he'd read in the past year. "We were all very impressed," recalls Mel Steely, one of the history professors who culled applications. Thus did Newt Gingrich become Professor Gingrich. It was Step 1 in a carefully laid plan that...

H.L. Mencken called his colleagues of the fourth estate “a gang of peck sniffs.” Some conservative commentators have become pundit sniffs, turning up their elitist noses at whoever the frontrunner for the Republican nomination happens to be. You’d think we didn’t have other pressing business – like saving the Republic from the mega-Marxist in the White House. Now, it’s former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s turn for an colonoscopy.

As Newt Gingrich has risen in the presidential polls, the campaign of former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has flushed a bevy of Republican establishment figures to criticize the former House Speaker. And they have plenty to work with. In a forty-year career in politics, Gingrich has stepped on a lot of toes and made plenty of enemies who are only too happy to come forward to say that he is temperamentally unfit to be president, would waste money on faddish intellectual exercises, has too much personal baggage, etc. As Gingrich himself acknowledges, some of these concerns are legitimate issues to...