Note 4. Pivotal Player
Gingrich and the Polarization of Congressional Parties
There are people whose actions influence the direction or pace of historical change. Former Speaker Newt Gingrich is one of them (his official portrait as speaker is shown above). Gingrich fit the times of increasing partisan polarization, but he made partisan polarization a strategy and measurably intensified it. There is no way to sugar-coat this—Gingrich is more responsible for partisan polarization in Congress than any other legislator. His formula for Republican strategy has been a strong influence on his successors, in defining the tactics of the most conservative Republicans in and out of Congress, and in shaping the strategies of Senate Republican leaders in the last three decades.
Let’s start with some highlights of Gingrich’s career:
elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1978 from a district in suburban Atlanta—the first Republican ever elected to the House from that district—on his third try;
created the Conservative Opportunity Society (COS) of House conservatives in 1983 to push his party to the right;
gained national attention by conducting a personal investigation of a Democratic speaker Jim Wright’s book deal, which led to Wright’s resignation;
elected party whip in 1989 while advocating party discipline and aggressive opposition to majority party Democrats;
elected speaker in 1995 after the retirement of Republican leader Bob Michel (R-IL) and the Republicans unexpected success in winning a House majority in the 1994 elections;
advocated the impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1998; and
gave up the speakership following the 1998 elections, the midterm elections of Clinton’s second term in which the Republicans lost a net of five seats.
In Note 3, I emphasized the way that political office holders, the public, activists, and the media interact to produce partisan polarization in Congress. That is true. By the time Gingrich was elected speaker in 1995, American politics already was showing signs of polarization. The South had elected many Republicans to Congress, all quite conservative, which very few conservative Democrats in Congress and reinforced the conservative side of the Republican conferences in the House and Senate. A variety of organizations representing anti-tax activists, the Christian right, and other conservative causes emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, recruited and backed candidates for office and pressured officeholders. The Rush Limbaugh Show premiered in 1988 and many conservative talk radio shows followed, facilitated by the abolition of the fairness doctrine by the FCC in 1987, a regulation that required broadcasters to provide balanced coverage of controversial issues. Limbaugh’s show quickly acquired the most listeners of any radio program in the country. Frustration with the ineffectual legislative efforts of President Ronald Reagan’s agenda in his second term, the priority given to economic issues over social issues, and the compromises on key issues by the President George H.W. Bush bred demands for stronger, more conservative leadership from some Republicans in and out of Congress.
It also is true that entrepreneurial politicians take stock of those developments, encourage them, and influence the direction and speed with which they affect the everyday activities of Congress. Through public appearances, speaking in party circles, and meeting with his COS collaborators, Gingrich offered an interpretation of those events that persuaded many Republicans that conservatives Republicans were the natural majority in the nation but were suffering from a “minority mind set” that kept them willing to compromise with majority party Democrats. He offered an alternative: Polarization and demonization, not moderation and compromise, would hasten the end of Democratic dominance of Congress and lead to a new conservative era that Reagan initiated by failed to fully establish. Sharpening the differences between the parties would force voters to choose between conservatives and liberals—a choice that would go his way, he insisted. Demonizing liberal Democrats—charging them with corruption and immorality—would help Republicans win more elections and a House majority. The “Conservative Opportunity Society” represented a vision that had to be contrasted with the liberal welfare state at every turn.
Moreover, Gingrich organized. He organized younger House Republicans, often southerners, who were in tune with the development of a more strident conservatism outside of Congress. They turned up the pressure on Michel and other Republican leaders to take a less compromising approach to legislating and to aggressively pursue public relations efforts, including the exploitation of C-SPAN coverage of House floor sessions, to disparage how Congress operated under liberal Democrats. He advocated focusing on wedge issues to split conservative constituencies from the Democrats and on magnet issues to attract support for his vision for America. Gingrich organized a COS political action committee and think tank, which soon were replaced by larger fundraising and research organizations.
Gingrich offered a strategy—a playbook—for winning a House majority. Two elements of that strategy merit special notice. First, a strong emphasis on ideology—on the faults of liberalism and the virtues of conservatism—would advantage the Republicans. This was grounded in the observation that more Americans called themselves conservatives than call themselves liberals. Majorities of Americans may favor individual federal programs, but when the choice is framed as smaller versus larger government, lower versus higher taxes, or conservative versus liberal, the conservative wins. Therefore, ideological labels, rather than something to be avoided in order to avoid alienating moderates, should be emphasized to undermine the image of liberals and motivate conservatives to support Republicans.
Second, Gingrich urged moderate Republicans to stick with their party and oppose the Democrats even on matters that appeal to moderate voters. The reason was simple: To force conservative Democrats to vote with their liberal leadership and create electoral problems for themselves at home, Republicans had to discontinue giving the Democrats votes. Discipline was required. Tolerance of party colleagues who frequently voted with the Democrats had to stop. The immediate result, of course, would be more party-line voting and the appearance of greater partisan polarization. Gingrich forecast that the strategy would (a) give voters would have a clearer choice between the two parties to the benefit of Republicans and more Republicans would be elected, particularly from the districts that had been electing moderate and conservative Democrats.
These two elements of the Gingrich playbook, ideology and party discipline, represented deliberate polarization of the two parties and a nationalization of congressional elections. It was a strategy that appealed to younger Republicans in the House who believed that the more tolerant, compromising, moderate approach of “establishment” Republican leadership rooted in the business-oriented constituency of the party had produced long-term minority status for the party. A revolution was required. It would marry social issues with the traditional emphasis on economic issues, be more closely tied to the religious right, and focus squarely on the national issues that divide the two parties.
The opportunity to implement his strategy more fully came when Gingrich was elected whip in 1989. By a stroke of luck, Dick Cheney (R-WY), the incumbent whip, was named secretary of defense by President George H.W. Bush that year and Gingrich ran to replace him. Gingrich’s arguments about radicalizing Republican strategy were well known and his election yielded the obvious mandate. Bob Michel, the minority leader, summed it up: “They want us to be more activated and more visible and more aggressive.”[1] This oppositional strategy became more relevant after Democrat Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 and contributed mightily to Clinton’s legislative struggles in 1993 and 1994. Then lightning struck again for Gingrich. Republicans won a House majority in the 1994 elections just as Bob Michel retired from the House, paving the way for Gingrich to be elected speaker.
Gingrich, as speaker, was king of the House. His party colleagues elected his acolytes as majority leader (Richard Armey, TX) and whip (Tom DeLay, TX), backed him when he named committee chairs, and supported deep cuts in committee staffs. The Contract with America, a list of legislative items that Gingrich designed before the 1994 elections, drove the party agenda in 1995. Committees and their chairs, under direction from the speaker, produced the legislation expected of them, which created a policy-making process that was more fully centralized in the speaker than the House had seen in nearly a century. Armey and DeLay did their part, too. DeLay, for example, championed the K Street Project, which demanded that lobbying and consulting firms wanting access to House Republicans had to hire Republicans, contribute to Republicans, and sever their ties to Democrats. The partisanship the Gingrich team advocated for their colleagues was expected of those who would benefit from their control of the House.
Gingrich’s downfall began with his failed brinksmanship game in 1995 and early 1996. Gingrich demanded that Clinton and the Democrats accept his plan for deep cuts in federal social programs as a condition for the House passing the annual appropriations bills. The appropriations bills were required to keep most domestic federal agencies open on October 1, 1995. Clinton refused, a long government shutdown occurred, and, as the months went by, the public blamed Gingrich and the Republicans for the stalemate. Gingrich finally gave up in early 1996, but not until grievous harm had been done to the party’s standing with the public and the speaker’s reputation. Gingrich had lost much of his value as a spokesman for the party and chose to become less visible. Republicans began to grumble about his leadership. Clinton was easily reelected in 1996, Gingrich’s public image did not improve, and, in mid-1997, Armey, Delay, and others considered having the House party conference find another speaker. Gingrich avoided being deposed, but he gave up the speakership after the Republicans lost a net of five seats in the 1998 elections. He would have had difficulty getting his party’s nomination for the speakership. His career in the House was over.
The Gingrich playbook was not set aside when Gingrich resigned from the House after the 1998 elections. Subsequent speakers—Republicans Dennis Hastert (R-IL), John Boehner (R-OH), and Paul Ryan (R-WI), and Democrat Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)—loosened the reins of leadership, but the House has not returned to pre-Gingrich form. For Republicans, the Gingrich strategy had become deeply rooted as a standard strategy: party-based policy making took over for committee-oriented policy making on important issues; compromise with the Democrats and Democratic presidents was ruled out, almost as a matter of principle; gaining and maintaining majority control of the House was paramount. Republicans had to avoid Gingrich’s errors, but the basic game plan remained in place. In fact, Armey and DeLay remained in the leadership for two and three more Congresses, respectively, under Hastert, who had been DeLay’s chief deputy whip and would go on to serve as speaker longer than any Republican.
We should not make the mistake of thinking that Gingrich or his successors were acting on their own and autocratically. They were constrained by the expectations of their colleagues, expectations that they helped to form. Gingrich in 1997, like Speaker Boehner in 2011, worked secretly with a Democratic president to get a major but surprising compromise on important policy challenges—social security and Medicare reform in the case of Gingrich and Clinton, taxes, spending, and debt limit in the case Boehner and Obama. In both cases, secrecy was required because, once disclosed, House Republicans would object to serious negotiations and rally conservatives everywhere against any compromises with a Democratic president. Only final deal, backed by both Republican speaker and Democratic president, had any chance of success. In both cases, the effort failed.[2] In the Gingrich case, the Monica Lewinski scandal intervened and Gingrich pulled out of the negotiations; in the Boehner case, word of the talks led to protests from is party conference. For Gingrich, his eventual desire to have a large policy impact and positive legacy appeared to be in conflict with the means he advocated for advancing his cause and had become accepted by his party colleagues.
Many House Republicans elected to the Senate in the 1980s and 1990s took the Gingrich playbook with them. Waiting for them was a handful of Republicans elected in the 1970s and early 1980s who formed the “Steering Committee.” The group pressed for action on conservative legislation and often pursued floor strategies—including offering floor amendments and conducting filibusters--without the cooperation of Republican floor leaders. When the younger new senators joined them in the late 1980s and 1990s, the ideological balance among Senate Republicans shifted and the Gingrich’s House Republican playbook seemed to become the Senate Republican playbook. Most notable among the new senators was Trent Lott (R-MS), who had been House Republican whip through the 1980s and was elected to the Senate in 1988. Trent was elected Senate Republican whip in 1995, ousting the more traditionalist, Alan Simpson (R-WY), and then was elected majority leader in 1996 after Bob Dole resigned the post to run for president. Lott and other former House members, including Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Rick Santorum (R-PA). Much like Gingrich and his circle of leaders, Lott chose to meet almost daily with a handpicked “Council of Trent” comprised of his strongest allies who backed him in leadership contests and some of whom held leadership posts themselves.
Remarkably, Lott eventually gave up his leadership post under a cloud, too. At the 100th birthday party of Strom Thurmond (R-SC), was reported saying, “When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years, either.”[3] The phrasing was remarkably similar to comments Lott made years earlier about Thurmond. The reaction to the news eventually led Lott to give up his position as floor leader. He was replaced by Bill Frist (R-TN) and later Mitch McConnell, whose advocacy of conservative policies and partisan legislative tactics were more aggressive-- by far--than Lott’s.
It would give Gingrich too much credit to attribute today’s Republican leaders’ strategies to him. Republicans who admire Gingrich for his ideological and partisan guidance has multiplied since Gingrich’s departure. At a minimum, today’s leaders are constrained by the expectations of their party colleagues who demand aggressive partisan strategies and who have shown a willingness to pursue such strategies on their own if their leadership chooses another path. In the House, the Freedom Caucus keeps that playbook open; in the Senate, the playbook appears to continue to guide the Steering Committee, a caucus of the most conservative senators, which is now headed by Mike Lee (R-UT) and finds its members in top party posts.[4]
Nevertheless, the aggressive, noncompromising, centralized, election-oriented leadership style of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy have a reasonably clear lineage that dates to Gingrich’s playbook and they know it. They sometimes struggle is to stay out in front of aggressive, conservative colleagues who have a large audience and many backers outside of Congress, along with a loud voices in conservative media, who demand fealty to the cause. They may be both beneficiaries and victims of the Gingrich playbook that so many conservatives have taken to heart. But they have chosen to accept the playbook as a core feature of their license to operate as leaders of their congressional parties.
[1] Robin Toner, “House Republicans Elect Gingrich of Georgia as Whip,” New York Times, March 23, 1989, B10. https://www.nytimes.com/1989/03/23/us/house-republicans-elect-gingrich-of-georgia-as-whip.html.
[2] On the 1997 Gingrich episode, see Steven M. Gillon, The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the Rivalry that Defined a Generation(Oxford University Press, 2008). On the 2011 Boehner episode, see Matt Bai, “Obama vs. Boehner: Who Killed the Debt Deal?” New York Times Magazine, March 28, 2012 [https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/magazine/obama-vs-boehner-who-killed-the-debt-deal.html].
[3] Thomas B. Edsall and Brian Faler, “Lott Remarks on Thurmond Echoed 1980 Words,” Washington Post, December 11, 2002. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/12/11/lott-remarks-on-thurmond-echoed-1980-words/c613ae1c-e17d-41c1-836a-4dd0741ec7c8/ [accessed May 15, 2021]
[4] Not to be confused with the Steering Committee of the Republican Conference, which makes committee assignments and Lee now chairs.