Nuts-and-Bolts Speaker

The Newt Gingrich revolution in Congress ended with stunning swiftness following Gingrich’s decision Friday to give up the speakership of the U.S. House of Representatives. Rep. Bob Livingston of Louisiana emerged Monday from a brief scramble as the Republicans’ candidate for speaker in the 106th Congress, convening in January. Livingston became the clear choice when Rep. Christopher Cox of Newport Beach decided late Sunday to fold his candidacy in favor of party unity.

Livingston’s victory was more a matter of internal House politics than a mandate for particular issues or ideology. The chairman of the House Appropriations Committee has been laying the groundwork to succeed Gingrich for the past year and merely accelerated his timetable when he overtly challenged Gingrich Friday.

If all goes as expected, all 222 of his GOP colleagues will grant Livingston their votes to make him speaker on Jan. 16, as Congress convenes. He had better enjoy that moment of unanimous support. From then on, he will face the challenge of holding together a party that is cracked into pieces along the political spectrum from the dwindled GOP moderates to the hard-line social conservatives.

This will be a far different speakership from that of Gingrich, who led the GOP revolution in the House in 1994 by campaigning throughout the country in behalf of his “Contract With America.” Livingston is expected to adopt the more traditional role of a speaker who concentrates on internal House matters such as the crafting of legislation, scheduling votes and trying to mediate disputes within the Republican membership. He is not the type to crusade nationally for the Republican cause, or for his personal vision.

The GOP’s margin in the House was cut to just 11 votes in the Nov. 3 election debacle that doomed Gingrich’s four-year speakership. Livingston, though he has a tendency to be quarrelsome, may be forced to work more closely with Democrats to obtain the needed votes on many major bills. This, we hope, means that legislation such as campaign finance reform will be brought to the floor much more readily than last year, when Gingrich refused to allow a vote on the measure until he was forced to do so by a rebellion of moderate Republicans.

Social conservatives insist that the GOP did badly in the election because the party did not push its cutting-edge issues hard enough. Moderates argue the opposite and point to the success of moderate GOP governors such as George W. Bush of Texas, who have pursued pragmatic solutions to problems such as education.

The 1998 election results indicate that the moderates are closer to the national mood. That will be more sharply determined as the debate moves out of the congressional arena and onto the national political stage, to be contested by candidates for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000.