William F. Connelly, Jr.
Washington and Lee University
Wags noted the absence of Newt Gingrich at the 2000 GOP Convention. CNN's Bill Schneider even spoke of the "de-Gingriching of the Republican Party." Sans speaking role, sans delegate status, the former Speaker was relegated to playing Fox News Sky Box pundit. Gingrich's political and personal failings, of course, explain in part his newfound invisibility. Still, this seems odd behavior for a party presumably indebted to Gingrich for leading them out of the "permanent minority" wilderness of House politics. What has become of Gingrich and the Republican Party?
Will the Real GOP Please Stand Up?
At the time of the Republican convention, National Journal's Richard E. Cohen asked: "Which of the following descriptions best fits the Republican Party assembling in Philadelphia?"1 Cohen went on to list competing characteristics: pragmatic or ideological, faction-ridden or unified on principles, sobered or zealous? One might add to the mix: party of the presidency, party of Congress, party of the governors or state and local representatives? Party of compromise or confrontation? Party of government or party of insurgency? Government or opposition? The answer is, of course, that the Republican Party (and for that matter the Democratic Party) is at all times all of the above.
Our parties are, to put it mildly, muddled coalitions of factions infighting over substance and style. James Madison's Constitution is one reason. Unlike the British parliamentary system in which the majority party forms the government, while the minority party plays loyal opposition, our constitutional system, with its separation of powers, federalism and bicameralism, provides no clear demarcation between government and opposition. In 1994 the GOP finally succeeded in becoming more the party of government by winning the House after 40 years in the minority.
While becoming more the party of government, the House GOP was, of course, not simply the party of government since, at a minimum, Bill Clinton was in the White House. Still, House Republicans became victims of their own electoral success. As Richard Fenno notes in Learning to Govern, these longtime insurgents had trouble making the transition to governing. They were loath to surrender the politics of confrontation and embrace the politics of accommodation. Speaker Gingrich, a successful wartime consigliere, seemed not to appreciate that managing the peace required different leadership skills.
For the House GOP, however, was the war really over? As the majority party in the House, were they really simply the party of government? Conventional wisdom has it that the Gingrich-led House Republican revolution faltered because they failed to make the transition from opposition to governing. After forty years as the "permanent minority" they naturally were slow to embrace compromise. But should they revert to the "go along to get along" style of Gingrich predecessor Bob Michel? And is the speakership of Denny Hastert really a "return to normalcy"?
Arguably, Gingrich provided the necessary bridge between the Michel and Hastert eras. As Jack Pitney and I note elsewhere, the House Republican revolution has given us the Gingrich corollary to Tip O'Neill's "all politics is local," namely, "except when it is national." The institution of Congress needs and invites different leadership styles; both confrontation and accommodation are normal and necessary, depending on the issue and the time. As one former Gingrich staffer noted, "Maybe a certain style of Speaker fits a certain age."2 Randy Strahan's use of Skowronek's "institutional time"captures this notion nicely.3
Both the Michel/Hastert and the Gingrich styles are necessary and normal. Both approaches are inherent in the dual nature of Congress. Even after six years as the majority, House Republicans are still not merely the "party of government" given divided government. Both confrontation and compromise are still necessary. Republicans need to strike a balance between the leadership style of Michel and Gingrich. Each seemed to recognize one half of the whole of the government versus opposition dilemma confronting legislative parties.
Finding a leader who can balance both halves of the equation is not easy. Gingrich may not have been temperamentally suited for such a balancing act especially given his penchant for personalizing political differences (something even allies like Vin Weber criticized). Recently Gingrich seemed to acknowledge his own limitations in speculating that Dick Cheney might have been a more appropriate Speaker. "I think that if Dick Cheney would have stayed in the House, I would have been his chief planner … and I would have never run for leadership." Gingrich elaborated, "I think Cheney might well have led us to a majority. He would have done it with his own style, but probably his style with my planning. I thought we were a very good team."4 In retrospect, Gingrich now recognizes the need for balance.
Congressional party leaders need the skills of both compromise and confrontation; they remain at all times part of the government and part of the opposition. Successful congressional leadership requires balance; comity and partisan competition are both virtues. Gingrich erred by coupling his instinctive tendency to overplay the politics of opposition with the presumption that he was the head of a parliamentary system. His critics sometimes err in assuming that legislative majority party leaders should simply play the politics of governing while abjuring partisanship. But ours is a separation of powers, not a parliamentary system.
Partisans and Political Scientists
Some partisans demonize Gingrich as if he is the sole cause of the heightened House partisanship and "politics of personal destruction" in the 1980s and 1990s. On the other hand, some political scientists diminish his individual impact by arguing that congressional leaders are mere creatures of their institutional context. Such partisans and political scientists cannot both be right. One is reminded of Tocqueville's famous observation that scholars always find "general causes" while politicians attribute everything to "particular incidents." "Probably," Tocqueville concludes, "both of them are mistaken."5 Still, there may be an element of truth to each perspective. Perhaps individuals matter even though individuals are, in part, limited by their institutional context. Perhaps, too, it is time to move beyond the simple, albeit useful, "institutional context and leadership style" dichotomy.
Clearly, Newt Gingrich made a difference, even if he has been banished to his own metaphorical Elba. House Republicans generally credit him with leading them out of their "permanent minority" wilderness. This probably overstates the case; however, Gingrich did mold what Cooper and Brady call "institutional context" by, for example, his long term GOPAC recruitment efforts and by inspiring greater House GOP policy consensus with the Contract with America. While constrained by the limits of the consensus he helped engineer, Gingrich and the House Republicans accomplished significant policy innovations, including welfare reform and a balanced budget. They also accomplished important institutional reforms. House Republicans privatized non-legislative services in the House, adopted time cap floor procedures fairer to the minority, and altered the balance between party and committee leaders, thus accelerating what Richard Cohen calls the "crack up of committees" begun under the Democrats. The latter change includes cutting the number of committees, realigning jurisdictions, effectively revoking the "subcommittee bill of rights," using task forces to qualify committee fiefdoms, and term limiting committee chairs. House Republicans' willingness to continue term limiting committee chairs provides a useful measure of their commitment to governing differently than Democrats.6
Ron Peters argues that "Gingrich's goal was to fundamentally change the character of the House as a legislative institution" with an experiment in party government.7 Yet, Gingrich's experiment in congressional party government fell short. Why?
Certainly institutional context defined as the party-in-government and the party-in-the electorate constrains leaders. Naturally, party sentiment constrains legislative leaders, including whether their party has tapped a large enough consensus in the electorate to be the majority. But institutional context can also usefully include constitutional structure and the institutional constraints of the separation of powers. Indeed, constitutional structure mediates the influence and the coherence of the party in the electorate and the party in government. The separation of powers affects both the electoral and the governing ambitions of the two parties.
In the 1990s, the separation of powers limited and advanced the electoral ambitions of both parties. Adopting a "losing to win" strategy, exemplified by the 1990 budget battle, House Republicans lost the White House in 1992 in order to win the House in 1994. In turn, the 1994 House GOP majority enabled Clinton to triangulate his way to his 1996 re-election. By 1998, the country seemed comfortable with divided government limiting both Gingrich and Clinton.
The separation of powers, of course, also limits and enables the governing ambitions of the two parties. Winning a House majority empowered Gingrich, though Senate and presidential ambitions were able to counteract his ambition. Madison's "different modes of election and different principles of action" for the House, Senate and presidency clearly limited the House Republican revolution. In Lessons Learned the Hard Way, Gingrich acknowledges gaining a vivid lesson in constitutional constraints, beginning with "the Senate as the cooling saucer" and extending to the presidency. "Even if you pass something through both the House and the Senate, there is that presidential pen. How could we have forgotten that?"8 Good question.
Speaker Gingrich's political downfall may be rooted in an intellectual error. He failed to take constitutional structure seriously because he believed "institutions are what leaders make them to be."9 Unfortunately for Gingrich, constitutional institutions are not so malleable. He failed to recognize that neither pure congressional government nor pure party government is altogether possible in our constitutional system; he fundamentally misunderstood Madison's separation of powers. Like Woodrow Wilson, Newt Gingrich failed to take the Constitution seriously.
Professorial Politicians
Newt Gingrich once called himself "the most seriously professorial politician since Woodrow Wilson," inviting comparison between these two intellectuals cum politicians.10 Gingrich is clearly an intellectual heir to Wilson; indeed, Wilson's 1885 Congressional Government reads like a field manual for Gingrich's mid-1990s experiment in congressional party government.
Both the Woodrow Wilson of Congressional Government and Speaker Gingrich were legislative supremacists who saw the House as the heart of Congress and the president as an administrator. Both favored responsible "party government" and abhorred decentralized "committee government" in Congress. Both favored an open politics of ideas, principles and "grand partisanship,"11 and both were critical of a pluralist politics of interest group bargaining, lobbying and log rolling. Both may have in theory exaggerated the role of powerful individual leaders, tending to assume that individual leaders matter more than institutions. Both had limited appreciation for constitutional forms. Both thought it possible to amend the Constitution by their actions and precedents. Both also believed that the public needs conspicuous leaders to understand Congress. Hence both appealed to the public beyond congressional politics as usual (e.g. Gingrich's use of the web and his nationally televised post-Contract address and Wilson's barnstorming national tour as president to promote the League of Nations). Both men proposed Contract-like party platforms to promote party accountability. In theory and practice Wilson and Gingrich both explored the limits and possibilities of congressional party government.
As part of their exploration into the potential for party government, Wilson and Gingrich examined the role of ideas in politics. Not surprisingly perhaps for professorial politicians, both men conflated statesmanship and rhetoric. In fact, Wilson offered a profound and clearly articulated theory of political leadership-as-education. Drawing on his British Parliamentary ideal, Wilson saw party government as promoting serious public deliberation to educate public opinion. Parties should provide voters a choice not an echo. Legislative leadership, he insisted, is government by discussion, advocacy and persuasion. For Wilson, the key function of Congress was to educate public opinion by means of deliberation; indeed, for him the informing function of Congress is paramount to the oversight and even legislative functions.
As Speaker, Gingrich seemed to take his cue from Congressional Government. Professor Gingrich reveled in his role of Speaker as educator, exploiting the "bully pulpit" of the speakership as an opportunity to teach.12 Gingrich is known more for his didactic manner than for his interest in legislative detail. Wilson in theory and Gingrich in practice explored the outer limits of the Speaker as educator.
Yet both professors as politicians learned hard lessons. Wilson and Gingrich in theory discounted the role of institutions in limiting leaders, but both in practice learned the power of constitutional structure. As president and Speaker respectively they learned that institutions matter and the Constitution counts. Their institutional responsibilities broadened their perspectives and gave each a practical education in the limits and possibilities of party government. Heirs to Wilson's thought can learn from Gingrich's experience. Today professors and politicians both would do well to learn from Wilson and Gingrich.
Congressional or Presidential Government?
In 1885 Professor Wilson looked at our constitutional system and saw Congressional Government. By 1908 and Constitutional Government Wilson began to dream of the possibilities of presidential government. Ironically, as president, Wilson began once again to have second (or third?) thoughts.13 How could so brilliant a professor and politician look at the same constitutional system and at different times see both congressional and presidential government? Perhaps it is because both the president and the Congress are powerful within our constitutional system. The separation of powers is more than checks and balances. It limits and empowers the president and Congress depending on the individuals, issues, and institutional time involved.
Gingrich has also had second thoughts. Like Wilson, he began by seeing Congress as the center of our political system, yet he too learned that the presidency is powerful. Perhaps these two professors and politicians met their match in another intellectual and politician, James Madison, whose "combining mind" taught them the limits and possibilities of his separation of powers.
To their credit, both Wilson and Gingrich correctly identified a weakness of Madisonian pluralism, namely a tendency to augment the role of competing interests or factions. Both Wilson and Gingrich also explored the role of ideas and parties in our constitutional system. Both exploited the potential in our constitutional system for promoting and enabling a politics of ideas and a politics of grand partisanship.
Because both committee and party leadership are powerful (albeit often at different times), Congress as an institution encompasses both a pluralist politics of compromising interests and a principled party politics of competing ideas. Neither pluralism nor party government completely captures the dynamic character of Congress as an institution. Each captures half the whole.
More than a century later, Woodrow Wilson's Congressional Government is still worth reading precisely because it provides a serious examination of the role of ideas, public deliberation, and party in American politics. Similarly, Newt Gingrich's thoughts and experience remain noteworthy. One hundred years from now, scholars will still be talking about the Gingrich speakership in much the same way that we talk today about Czars Reed and Cannon. The enduring legacy of Newt Gingrich for Congress, political parties, and political science will be his exploration in theory and practice of the limits of congressional party government. Ultimately, Gingrich recognized that powerful Speakers are possible within the context of our separation of powers system. Gingrich learned the limits of insurgency and the possibilities of governing, the limitations of "revolution" in an institutional structure inclined toward incrementalism, and the potential for change and policy innovation even under conditions of divided government. The experience of the Gingrich speakership can teach us that both individuals and institutions matter, both confrontation over ideas and compromise over interests are necessary.
The GOP is currently fleeing from the memory of Newt Gingrich; the pendulum may yet swing back. Who knows, like Woodrow Wilson, Gingrich may even run for president some day.
1. Richard E. Cohen, "Today's GOP," National Journal, July 29, 2000, 2462.
2. See David Baumann, "GOP Delegates Give Hastert Mixed Reviews," National Journal Convention Special, August 5, 2000, 2530
3. See Randall Strahan, "Reed and Rostenkowski: Congressional Leadership in Institutional Time," in Allen D. Hertzke and Ronald M. Peters, Jr., eds., The Atomistic Congress (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1992).
4. Matthew Vita and Dan Morgan, "A Hard-Liner With a Soft Touch," Washington Post, August 5, 2000, A10.
5. Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J.P. Mayer and A.P. Kerr (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1970), 61-62.
6. Ronald M. Peters, Jr., "Institutional Context and Leadership Style," in Colton C. Campbell and Nicol C. Rae, eds., New Majority or Old Minority? (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 53 - 56.
7. Ronald M. Peters, Jr., The American Speakership, 2d. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 303.
8. Newt Gingrich, Lessons Learned the Hard Way (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 6, 10.
9. Peters, The American Speakership, 300.
10. CNN NEWS, February 20, 1995, 8:21 a.m. Transcript #7:7.
11. Newt Gingrich, "Gingrich Address: New House Speaker Envisions Cooperation, Cuts, Hard Work." Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, November 12, 1994, 3296.
12. See William F. Connelly, Jr., "Newt Gingrich - Professor and Politician: The Anti-Federalist Roots of Newt Gingrich's Thought," Southeastern Political Review, March 1999, 103-127.
13. Daniel Stid, "A Wilsonian Perspective on the Newtonian Revolution," unpublished ms., 11.
