Gingrich Sees Less Militant Agenda for House GOP

Humbled by the political pounding he’s taken during the last two years, Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) on Wednesday accepted his party’s nomination to a second term as House speaker and expressed new willingness to pursue a less militant agenda than the revolutionary one he brandished when he first seized the gavel in 1994.

“If the last Congress was the ‘confrontation Congress,’ this Congress will be the ‘implementation Congress,’ ” Gingrich said in his acceptance speech. “And we will be very pleased two years from now at how much we have implemented.”

House Republicans nominated Gingrich as speaker by a unanimous voice vote, despite some lawmakers’ anxieties about his sagging popularity and unresolved ethics allegations.

Gingrich made no effort to conceal the toll taken by a barrage of criticism, ethics charges and negative advertising. “It was a very difficult two years,” he told his colleagues. “Some 80,000 ads later, I am still here. But it was painful.”

The most recent spate of criticism has come from fellow Republicans, as some called on Gingrich to step aside as speaker until the House Ethics Committee finishes its investigation of allegations about a college course he once taught as well as other parts of his political empire. But the mini-rebellion came to naught because Gingrich has a strong band of loyal followers and no one emerged to run against him.

The last obstacle to Gingrich’s formal election as speaker when the Congress convenes in January is the ethics investigation, which he decries as politically motivated. If the panel indicates that it will issue formal charges before the end of the year, Gingrich may face more GOP opposition to his taking the speaker’s chair.

The pace and politics of the Ethics Committee investigation may be affected by whether the GOP leadership tries to change the membership of the panel, which is appointed by the leaders of the two parties. Gingrich, who as speaker has the power to appoint the GOP members, has handed off that responsibility to House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) because the panel is considering the speaker’s case, according to Armey spokeswoman Michelle Davis.

Davis said that Armey is planning to discuss the makeup of the committee with House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), and that Armey is considering whether to replace the many members who have bumped up against the House’s six-year limit on service on the panel, or to waive the rules and extend their tenure to maintain continuity in the ethics investigation.

Aides to the House Democratic leadership voiced outrage at the notion that members of the committee would be changed in the middle of the Gingrich investigation.

“He gets to decide who his jury is?” said a Gephardt aide. “It would be madness. There is no possibility of that ever occurring.”

An aide to House Minority Whip David E. Bonior (D-Mich.), who has led the charge against Gingrich on the ethics probe, said, “They are trying to rig the Ethics Committee and change the committee in a way that appears to be to their advantage.”

Davis denied that Armey had decided to replace any members of the committee, but she acknowledged that some members want to be relieved of serving on the panel, which is one of the House’s least desired assignments.

“The ones that have been put in their six years are not anxious to stay,” Davis said.

When the Ethics Committee in the late 1980s was conducting its investigation of then-Speaker Jim Wright (D-Texas), several members stayed beyond the terms set by rules until the investigation ended.

One option in the Gingrich case, the Gephardt aide suggested, would be to require the existing members to continue until the Gingrich case is complete and to name new members to handle new cases.

But the ethics matter remained in the background during Wednesday’s nomination procedures. When the presiding officer put the Gingrich nomination to a voice vote, the call for “ayes” received a thunderous response; you could hear a pin drop when he called for the “nays.”

Gingrich described it as a “bittersweet day” because his stepfather had died of lung cancer just hours earlier.

Republicans also renominated other top House leaders, including Armey, a hard-line conservative who nonetheless echoed Gingrich’s conciliatory tone.

“This is truly a new beginning,” Armey said in his acceptance speech. “We have a world within which to work that is much more congenial to the dedicated business of hard, serious legislative work.”

The full House will formally vote on the speaker and other party posts when Congress convenes on Jan. 7.

On the other side of the Capitol, the top Senate Democrat welcomed signs that Gingrich would be more cooperative. “He wants to be a different speaker,” said Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.). “And we want again to find ways with which to make that happen.”

Daschle called on Republicans to begin by working with Democrats to produce a bipartisan campaign-finance reform proposal in the first 60 days of the new Congress. However, Gingrich did not mention the subject in his acceptance speech or at a subsequent news conference.

Whether the cooing about bipartisanship lasts beyond the post-election honeymoon remains to be seen. But it is clear that Gingrich and his allies have resolutely discarded their take-no-prisoners strategy of confrontation and their revolutionary rhetoric of 1994.

Back then, Republicans were euphoric with their ascension to majority power in Congress for the first time in 40 years. But they have since learned, through a stomach-turning roller-coaster ride in the polls, the limits of the public’s enthusiasm for such tactics as shutting down the government to force big reductions in the scope of government.

Republicans say they have toned down the rhetoric in part because they have the luxury of being less impatient for change: It looks like they now have a more secure grip on power than they did in 1994. Most analysts expect Republicans to make further gains in the 1998 elections, because the president’s party historically has lost seats in off-year elections.

“Now we have a broader horizon with which to plan,” said House Republican Conference Chairman John A. Boehner (R-Ohio). “It is pretty clear Republicans are here to stay.”

Gingrich’s speech was a 25-minute amalgam of humility and pride in leading the party to an election victory that gave the GOP control of the House two terms in a row for the first time since the 1920s.

“I made a few big errors,” he said. “I was both the speaker of the House and our leading advocate, and some days I didn’t do it very well.

“And yet, when it was all over . . . the American people, for the first time in 68 years, decided to reaffirm a Republican direction of the U.S. House of Representatives.”

He and other Republicans said they saw more potential for working with President Clinton because he campaigned on so many themes they considered their own--fighting drugs, balancing the federal budget and reforming welfare.

“We bear the unusual burden of reaching out to a Democratic president and saying, ‘Together we are, in fact, going to find common ground,’ ” Gingrich said. “Fortunately this campaign did create a lot of that common ground.”

Gingrich called for action on such traditional Democratic terrain as education, health care and the environment, as well as such GOP perennials as fighting drugs, strengthening defense and restoring the place of religion in public life.

On foreign affairs, Gingrich went against the grain of some Republicans by decrying isolationism. “We have no choice except to design a new framework of American leadership on a world basis,” he said. “Our goal is not to withdraw from the U.N.; it’s to reform the United Nations.”

In the period before his renomination, Gingrich had moved to quiet some critics by agreeing to changes in the leadership structure that reversed some of the extraordinary steps he had taken in the 104th Congress to centralize power. He has pledged to give more power to the House’s committee chairmen--who have traditionally been the central legislative power-brokers in the House but were recently often sidelined by leadership initiatives and task forces.

And Gingrich has disbanded an elite advisory group of his closest allies, who critics said made too many decisions on their own. Instead, he has agreed to allow decisions to be made by a broader leadership group that includes new representatives of the party’s moderate and conservative wings.

Times staff writer Sam Fulwood III contributed to this story.