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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