Will Newt Heed His Own Advice?

Newt Gingrich has been very good to me. Pressed against a column deadline without a fit topic in mind, I can always rely on the House speaker to do or say something sufficiently outrageous to get my creative juices flowing. A lot of columnists and cartoonists must feel the same way. I mean, you’ve got to love a guy who came up with 19th century orphanages as the solution to the exploding social problems we will experience in the 21st century. Even Dan Quayle wasn’t that good.

So it is with some hesitation that I now visit Gingrich’s most recent troubles with the House Ethics Committee and the special counsel investigating his alleged ethical lapses. It’s not sporting to kick a man when he’s down, and, as the ever-compassionate conservative columnist Arianna Huffington has noted, “Gingrich’s approval ratings are rising; they are now 7 points higher than that of the Unabomber.”

It’s only going to get worse, but Gingrich should have expected it. After all, this is the guy who rose to fame by destroying Democratic Speaker Jim Wright in 1988 over a far less serious ethics complaint. All that Wright supposedly did was attempt to line his pockets by strong-arming lobbyists into buying multiple copies of a book he wrote. At least he didn’t force them to read it, the way that Gingrich tries to get everyone to watch his hectoring TV shows financed by tax-deductible donations.

The charges against Gingrich are far more serious: that he misused tax-exempt funds in his bold campaign to pack the Congress with like-minded “revolutionaries.” This cloning of Gingrich, which gave him control of the House, may come to be marked as one of the most costly perversions of the American political system.

While the basic charges against Gingrich are not new, the willingness of the Republicans on the Ethics Committee to take them seriously and indeed expand the scope of their investigation is. And, shades of the Watergate cover-up, they have added the far more threatening charge that the speaker may have deceived Congress in its investigation of his affairs.

For almost two years, committee chair Nancy Johnson (R-Conn.), a Gingrich appointee, stonewalled the investigation. But suddenly last week, the committee voted unanimously to expand its inquiry to determine whether Gingrich provided them with “accurate, reliable and complete information.” Unanimous means that the Republicans on the committee, all handpicked by Gingrich, have been forced by emerging evidence to turn on the man who made them what they are.

They didn’t do this turnabout just because Gingrich is now a loser who drags down the Republican ticket every time he opens his mouth. What finally got the Republicans on the committee to act is the still-secret report from the special counsel, James M. Cole, a nonpolitical and highly respected prosecutor appointed to look into the murky world of Gingrich fund-raising.

Obviously the Republican members of the committee, after reading Cole’s preliminary report, decided that something had to be done, lest they go down with Gingrich. “Certain facts have been discovered,” the committee reported, sounding like Inspector Clouseau and suggesting with those five ominous words that Gingrich’s world is about to come unglued.

The Democrats insisted that the Cole report be made public, and the Republicans, in order to stave off a preelection disaster, came up with a compromise. The report, which the public has every right to read, will remain sealed, but at least the full Ethics Committee lent its imprimatur to the ongoing investigation. The focus has shifted from Gingrich’s alleged misuse of tax-exempt funds into the more serious area of misusing Congress by lying to it.

Back in 1988, Gingrich, attacking Wright, thundered that a speaker of the House had to be holier than thou: “The rules normally applied by the Ethics Committee to an investigation of a typical member are insufficient in an investigation of the speaker . . . the second most powerful elected position in America. Clearly this investigation has to meet a higher standard of public accountability.”

Gingrich insisted at the time that it is impossible for the Ethics Committee of the House to meet that high standard while the subject of the investigation is the boss man of the House. Well, even for the most pompous of congressional folks, what goes around comes around. To be consistent, Gingrich should resign the speakership. Or the citizenry could end his embarrassing reign by voting the Republican majority out. In either case, it would be hard on scribblers like me not to have Speaker Gingrich as our muse. But heck, it’s a small price to pay for the good of the republic.