Gingrich Blasts Critics of GOP Social Service Cuts

A day after activists protesting Republican social service cuts kept House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) from delivering a speech, he lashed out at liberals, who, he said, charge that “if you don’t give every child a Ferrari you’re cheating them.”

Defending House GOP initiatives against a mounting campaign of criticism, Gingrich blamed Democratic policies and their defenders for creating and sustaining “a mess” that “needs to be replaced.”

Speaking at a press conference, Gingrich said the hecklers who disrupted his speaking engagement Monday were among “those who would extort money out of the taxpayer.”

At the same time, Gingrich backed away from recent comments suggesting that he would support some key points of the gay-rights community’s agenda. A day after Gingrich’s half sister lobbied the Speaker on a range of gay-rights issues, Gingrich told reporters that he opposes giving homosexuals federal protections from discrimination in hiring and firing.

Gingrich also accused homosexual activists of “recruitment in so-called counseling programs” and said he is “very cautious about the idea that you want to have active homosexuals in junior high school and high school explaining to young people that they have all of these various wonderful options.”

In recent weeks, House Republicans have moved to restructure programs for school lunches, cash welfare assistance and food stamps, as well as those aimed at supporting disabled children and education programs targeted to low-income populations. The House Republicans also have proposed scrapping the current system of public housing and eliminating most benefits for illegal immigrants.

The result has been a torrent of opposition from Democratic defenders of those programs as well as from program beneficiaries.

According to Rep. David Dreier (R-San Dimas), a Gingrich lieutenant, the charges have left the House leader “angry and frustrated” and some Republican members stung because the opposition’s punches “are landing.”

About the school lunch program, “they have this focused message: Republicans are taking food from the mouths of babes, and nothing could be farther from the truth,” Dreier said. “But we don’t have the luxury of focusing on one single issue because we have so much other work to do.”

Dreier echoed Gingrich’s assertion that Republicans have increased funds for school lunches by 4.5% over this year’s levels, and placed strict limits on the amount that states could spend on program administration. But Republicans’ claims to have improved the program have largely been lost amid opponents’ charges that funding increases will fall short of inflation and increasing demand and that program changes likely will force some schools to discontinue their school lunch programs altogether.

“Our point is, who is being callous? Is it the people responsible for the conditions the poor live in today or the people trying to fix that?” asked Gingrich spokesman Tony Blankley. “We’re the people trying to fix that. For the ones responsible for these problems to claim some moral high ground for the failure that is evident in the faces of poor children of America is repugnant. We reject that.”

In a speech Monday night, Gingrich told 200 business executives of the John Quincy Adams Society that many newspaper editorial boards contain “socialists” and that their companies should reconsider whether to advertise in papers that oppose their views. Gingrich told the meeting that the Establishment press is the “mortal enemy” of reform-minded Republicans, the Washington Post reported.