The Birch Log
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The Harmful Effect of Gingrich
by John F. McManus
Release date: 4/29/96
Who can be surprised that the Republican Party has
chosen as its presidential candidate Bob Dole, the
quintessential Establishment "conservative." While he
has a far more appealing personal history than does
Bill Clinton, he will offer hardly any difference on
major issues. Like Clinton, he is an internationalist
and a big spender. Most of all, he is a compromiser.
Dole used his considerable clout in the Senate to ruin
any conservative action over the budget, troops to
Bosnia, and gun control. He has also supported NAFTA,
GATT, affirmative action, environmentalism, tax increases,
and "reform" at the UN rather than U.S. withdrawal from this
world government-to-be.
While it is certainly important who fills the office of
President, the real battle to restore constitutionally
limited government will be won in the House of
Representatives where, the Constitution says, "All Bills for
raising revenue shall originate...." Simply put, if the House
decides not to fund the Department of Education, military
deployment to Bosnia, participation in the United Nations,
agriculture subsidies, etc., there is nothing the Senate, the
President, the Supreme Court, or anyone else can do about it.
A friend recently summarized the dismal performance of the
104th Congress in the House led by Speaker Newt Gingrich.
After expressing his awareness that many Americans believed
the huge influx of freshmen would start unraveling big
government, he noted: "Gingrich has achieved something
almost unthinkable: He has kept Republican freshmen from being
conservative and yet has set them up for possible defeat in
November for being too conservative!"
The 73 new representatives elected in 1994 were overwhelmingly
committed to shrinking the size and cost of government. But
they accomplished next to nothing. Gingrich was their leader
and his "Contract with America" was sold to the nation as good
medicine for an ailing country. But the Contract called for a
lot of downright poison: balance the budget with a
loophole-filled amendment that would reflect ill of the
Constitution instead of Congress; expand NATO; deliver more
crime control power to the federal government; federalize a host
of laws dealing with children; etc.
During the 104th, Gingrich became deservedly known as a master
of offensive brashness and know-it-all bluster. Before 1995 had
ended, he had achieved one of the highest negative ratings ever
detected by the nation's pollsters.
In the coming election campaign, Democrats plan to have their
House candidates run as hard against Gingrich as they do against
their Republican opponents. The tactic threatens to be so
successful that numerous freshmen Republicans have already
expressed concern about their re-election chances. Some, like
John Hostettler (R-IN) and Helen Chenoweth (R-ID), have either
asked Gingrich to stay out of their district or breathed a sigh
of relief when the Speaker decided to cancel appearances on their
behalf.
Gingrich isn't fooling anyone who has studied his career. He also
isn't fooling a lot of the media that continues to portray him as
a hard-line conservative, even as it characterizes hard-line
conservatism as detestable. His membership (along with Bill
Clinton's) in the globalist Council on Foreign Relations says
plenty. And the constant reminder from CFR types that Gingrich is
the leader of the conservative opposition - his being named Time
magazine's Man-of-the-Year, for instance - should make any
reasonably informed person wonder why the Establishment is
boosting Gingrich.
One of the Speaker's crucially destructive deeds was his
pro-GATT/WTO leadership during the December 1994 lame-duck session
of Congress. The vote on GATT should never have occurred until the
far more conservative new Congress convened in January 1995. But
the Establishment eagerly wanted America entangled in this latest
stepping stone to world government. The Speaker-to-be could have
forced the vote into the next Congress, but he performed well for
his internationalist friends who got a key item in their destructive
agenda approved. Only recently, GATT's World Trade Organization
flexed the muscles given it by Gingrich and others to interfere with
our nation's importation of oil. We must now submit to the dictates
of a 120-member international trade confederation.
Newt Gingrich won his seat in the Congress in 1978. During his first
term, he supported, among other things, the creation of the
Department of Education and most favored nation status for Communist
China. He later voted to supply taxpayer money to facilitate trade
with the murderous regime in China. The word was out, however, that
this Rockefeller-supporting Republican must be labeled a conservative,
a designation that would prove to be very useful for America's
internal enemies in the years ahead.
Newt Gingrich's leadership has been a disaster for the nation. What
he is and what he stands for must become known if the House of
Representatives is to accomplish the task it is empowered to do:
Roll back big government and disentangle America from the new world
order.
Copyright 1996 The John Birch Society
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