Congressional GOP

Updated 3/25/97

Gingrich's Friends Turn to Foes As Frustration Builds

By Jackie Koszczuk, CQ Staff Writer

This is how House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., got into trouble the week of March 17: He inflamed his party's core supporters, had a public spat with his top lieutenant, steamrolled over a committee chairman, reversed himself on the itinerary of a sensitive foreign trip and led Republicans to a humiliating defeat on the floor.

But the biggest showstopper of all was still to come. In an extraordinary three-hour meeting of the GOP Conference on the night of March 20, Gingrich forced a band of rebels, who had disagreed with the leadership's handling of funding for congressional committees, to stand up before their colleagues like guilty schoolboys and explain their dissenting votes. Then he told them they should consider leaving the Republican Party and threatened to take away their committee assignments.

Yet despite these histrionics, and the missteps that preceded them, the pre-recess week was not a total loss for Gingrich, whose creaky leadership is increasingly being questioned within the party. The Speaker presided over two victories on party-defining issues. The House passed a business-backed bill regulating overtime and a ban on a controversial abortion procedure opponents call "partial birth" abortion. The latter was achieved by a resounding vote of 295-136.

"This was the first week we did anything," said Rep. Matt Salmon, R-Ariz., one of the conservative rebels Gingrich called on the carpet March 20.

But the problem for Gingrich was that members left for a two-week recess talking far less about his accomplishments than about his failures. After all, who notices a new sofa in the living room when the house is on fire?

As the 105th Congress has slowly taken shape, Gingrich has struggled to rehabilitate himself and his Speakership while attempting to lead a restive House GOP. After he was narrowly re-elected Speaker in January and then reprimanded by the House ethics committee, he embarked on a recovery program that was to strengthen the weaker aspects of his leadership and eventually restore his power-- if not the power he knew in early 1995, then some lesser but operable version of it.

So far, the Speaker has been unable to take those remedial steps. Rather, he has slipped back into the pattern that so concerned fellow Republicans during his fall from grace in the 104th Congress: an erratic style, an inability to communicate a coherent strategy to his followers and embarrassing missteps that force GOP lawmakers to explain his actions to their constituents.

Frustration with his direction led 11 conservative members of the party, all but one of them from the Class of 1994, to vote against the rule that would bring to the floor the leadership bill (HRES91) that authorizes spending by all the standing committees.

The bill contained an overall increase of 14 percent in committee spending, and the defectors seized on that as a symbol of their disaffection. But the problem goes far deeper.

A sign of Gingrich's decline is the willingness of Republican lawmakers to criticize him outside their own tight political circles. While the Speaker has been denounced for months by fellow conservatives in the media, House members until recently had defended him like a bunker. Now there are cracks in the wall.

"People are restless. We want leadership to lead," said Rep. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., one of the 11 defectors.

One GOP moderate who previously had been reluctant to criticize the Speaker said: "He insists on saying and doing things that are a little outrageous. It ends up in the press and gets him in trouble. He can't seem to do things in a controlled way."

Behind the scenes, Republicans are engaged in fierce discussions about how to fix their hobbled leadership. Rep. Steve Largent, R-Okla., another of the defectors, said: "People are discussing a lot of alternatives and they range from the mild and sublime to nuclear warfare."

COVERT COMPETITION

Continued low marks for his performance could produce some unhappy results for Gingrich. For instance, as the dissatisfied members of the conference grow bolder, it could force into the open what has been a quiet and subtle competition among prospective successors.

House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, has grown increasingly independent of the Speaker -- and increasingly willing to stake out positions of his own when he disagrees. When Gingrich said on March 17 that congressional Republicans may have to separate their cherished tax cut from their budget-balancing legislation in order to strike a deal with Clinton, Armey reached out on his own to angry conservatives and said he would never support a budget without tax cuts.

Armey has been seeking advice from fellow members and his former press secretary about improving his appearances on the Sunday talk show circuit. High-level staff members serving Gingrich and Armey who once enjoyed a close working relationship are also increasingly at odds with each other, according to one top leadership aide.

More private jockeying is going on among the lower-ranking leaders. Rep. John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, and Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas, have long been competitors and both are well aware that they could face off for majority leader or another leadership job if Gingrich does not seek re-election as Speaker in the next Congress.

Recently, Boehner has taken steps to improve his one-on-one services to individual members, which could help him in a future leadership race.

For the moment, there is little evidence that Republicans in the House have the desire or the means to depose their Speaker. But even the hint of an impending Speaker's race for the 106th Congress has produced internal fractures in the leadership that impede his ability to set strategy and to lead, according to one top Republican.

Rep. Jim Nussle, R-Iowa, said, "There's some troubling competition going on within the leadership. Rather than doing the job, there are some people whose ambitions are showing through, which is troubling because we have important work to do."

Gingrich kicked off the week with what he considered an offhand remark to reporters about the possibility that House Republicans would agree to temporarily postpone their tax cut proposals in order to improve their chances of getting a balanced-budget deal with Clinton. (Story, p. 693)

His comments touched off a storm among conservatives, who interpreted them as a retreat from the Republican commitment to tax cuts, which Gingrich himself had often called the "crown jewel" of the 1994 "Contract With America."

The notion of floating the tax idea publicly came out of a dinner for visiting Republican governors that Gingrich hosted earlier this month at the Capitol Hill Club. After the dinner, Gingrich asked DeLay to bring it up at a meeting DeLay was scheduled to have with the Washington Times newspaper editorial board.

DeLay's comments there raised eyebrows, but it was not until Gingrich reiterated the concept several days later that conservatives reacted with real alarm. Other party leaders, caught off guard by Gingrich's remarks, sought to placate the faithful by reiterating their commitment to tax cuts.

Armey, for one, was at pains to reiterate his stand. He had not been included in the Gingrich-DeLay trial balloon strategy, and he took public exception, saying there would be no budget deal without substantial tax cuts on the table.

Two days later, on March 19, Gingrich told GOP lawmakers in a closed-door session that he was unalterably committed to tax cuts, but was simply looking for a way to get Clinton to agree to both a balanced budget and tax relief.

In Gingrich's view, according to a Republican close to the leadership, Clinton would be unable to find an excuse to back out of a budget deal if tax cuts were temporarily off the table. Later, the president would be presented the tax cut package -- either as part of reconciliation or in 1998, an election year. If he signed it, it would be a victory for the GOP. If he didn't, it would still be a win because Republicans would use the issue in the campaign against Democrats, the Republican said.

But conservatives remember that Clinton walked away from a budget deal last year and they are unwilling to yield on their tax cut proposal so early in the negotiating process. Rep. Sam Johnson, R-Texas, said, "I believe if we don't get the tax relief first, we won't get it."

STYLE, NOT SUBSTANCE

The loudest howling was not about Gingrich's idea but about how he seemed to be plotting GOP strategy in the press without bothering to inform fellow lawmakers. Nussle, once an unwavering Gingrich supporter, said: "I never heard of a coach who goes out and holds a post-game press conference before he even talks to the players. Now that the coach has spoken, let him explain what's going on, since it hasn't been adequately explained to any of us."

One influential member of the large Republican Class of 1994 said, "This is classic Newt. He gets out ahead of the conference and says things innocently, and doesn't realize the impact of them. It was ill-advised and damaging."

Gingrich was soon forced to make amends with conservatives for the second time within the week.

In planning his first major overseas diplomatic trip as Speaker, Gingrich had arranged to lead a bipartisan, 10-member congressional delegation to China and three other Asian countries. Conservative groups objected that he left Taiwan out of his itinerary, viewing this as a snub of Beijing's noncommunist neighbor.

Gingrich at first said it was too late to add Taiwan to the trip, which was scheduled to begin March 23 and end April 1. But on March 19, Gingrich reversed course and added an April 2 stop in Taiwan to the schedule. Spokeswoman Christina Martin said, "Enough people had brought to his attention issues which they feel need to be addressed."

But the week's most jarring events came March 20, after the leadership lost an important procedural vote on the floor as the House prepared to recess for Easter.

The vote on which the 11 Republicans defected was a vote on the rule governing a resolution to provide $178.3 million for the operation of committees. The bill included a proposed 48 percent increase in funding for the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, which is investigating White House fundraising in the 1996 election.

The rule failed 213-210. It was only the second time since Republicans came to power in 1995 that the leadership has lost a vote on a rule.

The rebels objected to the costs of the resolution in the absence of an overall Republican strategy on spending for the year. "Without a larger context, it's difficult to lead," said third-term Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., one of the defectors.

Many of the rebels had been among those Republicans reluctant to support Gingrich for re-election as Speaker in January. (Weekly Report, p. 151)

After the floor rebellion, a furious Gingrich hauled the 11 into a closed-door meeting of the GOP caucus and demanded that they explain themselves. One rebel said the Speaker also threatened them and suggested they leave the party if they didn't agree with him. The next day, Rep. Joe Scarborough, R-Fla., said in a C-SPAN interview that the dissenters belonged to the "party of Ronald Reagan." He suggested Gingrich leave the party if he didn't agree with them.

Later on March 21, Republicans patched over their differences and adopted, 213-179, the resolution to provide funding for the Government Reform and Oversight Committee's campaign finance investigation, putting off the fight over increased funding for other committee operations until after the recess.

BRIGHT SPOTS

The week's two bright spots for the leadership were the two items from Gingrich's own agenda that won passage earlier in the week.

Republicans won a victory over organized labor and its Democratic allies by passing, on a vote of 222-210, legislation allowing employers to offer workers compensatory time off in lieu of overtime pay. President Clinton has threatened to veto the bill, which would revoke a longstanding guarantee of overtime pay to hourly wage-earners who work more than 40 hours in a week.

A bill banning the controversial "partial-birth" abortion procedure passed, 295-136, by a higher margin than the measure received in the last Congress. Clinton also objects to that bill and it may run into opposition in the Senate.

Yet, even Gingrich's victories were marred by leadership snafus.

Rolling over popular Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry J. Hyde, R-Ill., the leadership scrapped a version of the abortion bill that his committee had marked up and substituted another bill, which is identical to the bill Clinton vetoed last year. The leadership wanted to present the president with the same bill so he could not offer any new reasons for objecting to it.

Asked why Gingrich had not brought Hyde into the strategy earlier, one top-ranking Republican who declined to be identified said: "We never intended to do it this way. Mistakes were made."

Somehow, the House leader said, the leadership failed to communicate the plan to Hyde and his staff although it had intended to.

Part of Gingrich's problem, say some concerned Republicans, is that he continues to act on the seeming assumption that he is as influential as he was at the beginning of the 104th Congress, shortly after leading his party's takeover of the chamber.

"He still suffers from hubris,"' said one Republican, speaking on condition of anonymity. "He still thinks that whatever he says, people are going to do."