Conference hosted by the library of congress. Its just under an hour and a half. This is our final panel for the history conference on the political legacy of Newt Gingrich, arguably one of the most influential speakers of the house in the past hundred years. I think theres no dispute that were all living the legacy of Newt Gingrich, so i will turn it over to Jacob Strauss who is our chair for the panel from the Congressional Research service. You guys put on a great conference. Its wonderful to get away from our desks and talk to people about all kinds of subjects related to congress so im very happy to be here. As colleen said, we will talk about the historical and political legacy of Newt Gingrich and we stand between lunch and you going home which may or may not be a good thing, but we have a great panel with two very interesting speakers so stick around because there will be good stuff here. Well start with the paper by mack green and jeffrey crouch. As we agreed before, each speaker will get 20 minutes and well do two papers and well open it up to you for questions, so, matt . Thank you, jacob. We have a lot of people to thank. I just want to take a couple of minutes before doing the presentation to thank colleen shogun for putting together this conference. American university and Catholic University for providing Financial Support for our project which is an ongoing project and this is part of a book length project were doing about Newt Gingrich, and i also want to thank carly jones, our Research Assistant and i said how is the data gathering going . She said, its great. Im still gingriching, which is the first time ive ever used the word gingrich used as a verb. We want to thank the dirksson center and the study of congress for their assistance and the Research Staff at the university of west george a special collections and the Carl Albert Center and the library of congress where weve done Archival Research, as well. So this is part, as i say, a booklength project about the leadership of Newt Gingrich and what im going to present today is the work weve done so far on gingrich in his first three terms in the house of representatives. So we have three general goals on this project and the first is provide a general overview of the kinds of things that gingrich did in congress not just as speaker, but before he was speaker and before he was in leadership. Second, we want to delve a little bit into this question of gingrichs contributions to congress and the way that congress works. There are some who have argued that gingrich made major contributions to the house and also contributed to increased partisanship and those other two have argued that its contextual factors and we can delve into that and provide an answer to that question and third, the model of leadership that can explain the kinds of things gingrich did not only as speaker and also as an informal lead and are someone outside of leadership so very briefly, i want to talk about some of the other things that others said about gingrich in trying to conceptuali conceptualize gingrich as a lead are in the house of representatives. Barbara wrote a piece that gingrich should be thought of as an agent when he was speaker and an agent of his party and constrained by the things his party wanted him to do or didnt want him to do, and strahan wrote about gingrich as speaker as nor of a transformational leader which is more by the nature in which he was elected was able to bring about substantive changes and major independent changes to congress, and then ive argued that gingrich is one of many speakers who were driven by multiple goals and not only what his party wanted and what his district wanted and what he personally wanted and one issue with these approaches is that they look at gingrich as speaker and were hopeful for a broader approach that could hopefully explain gingrich as speaker and before he was speaker and try to capture the things about him that made him independent or some would say one of a kind, but at the same time be generalizable. What we suggest in the paper is to think about gingrich as what we call a strategic, political entrepreneur. Let me break that down. First the political entrepreneur side, a number of whom are here today and also particularly entrepreneurs in congress. So greg morrow has written about legislative entrepreneurs, and those who expend scarce resources to try to enact legislation in the legislature. Eric schickler writes about entrepreneurs who bring about institutional change, what could be called procedural entrepreneurs. So what we suggest in the paper is another kind of entrepreneur, a political entrepreneur. This is someone who expends resources to bring about a collective good in this case for a party or somed in Logical Group in the party and it could help get partisans reelected or recruiting folks to office or doing other things to help the party. Now this is usually what people expect formal Party Leaders to do, but what we argue is you could have rank and file members do this, as well, and in the interest of time i cant go into too much detail, but we speculate in the paper about other rank and file members who might qualify as being this category of political entrepreneur. The other side of this is the strategic side. Now one would expect that entrepreneurs would be strategic, thinking medium to long term about how to achieve their particular objectives, but of course, they dont necessarily have to be. In gingrichs case, it is important to emphasize the strategic side of being an entrepreneur and making plans and having goals, medium and longterm goals and acting strategically to achieve those goals. So what we do in the paper is talk a little bit about strategy and we borrow from military theory in thinking about strategy. In particular, a wellestablished definition of strategy as a threelegged stool and the idea is that a stool to be stable, the three legs need to be of the same length and in this case, the three legs of strategy are your objectives and your immediate objectives and your means by which you would achieve those and the resources you have available to do so. If the legs are not of equal length, the stool is more unstable and the risk of failure in achieving your broad, strategic goal increases and i did this both to think about strategy in terms of what gingrich is trying to do, but also suggest that it could help us give insight into why gingrich was, for the first two congresses unable to achieve his immediate strategic objective and was more able to do so in his Third Congress. So what we do in the paper is we identify the broad goals that we argue gingrich had at least when he was in the minority and then the shorter term objectives means and resources he had to achieve those. I wont go through the whole list on the table, but i will note that first of all, his primary goal from the moment he got elected to congress, in fact, before he was even sworn in was to win the majority of the Republican Party and the speaker to maintain that. Say what you want about gingrich, this was a goal he had consistently as a member of congress. It was an unflagging goal that he had to get the republicans and the majority in the house and recall that the republican his lost the majority in the house in 1954 and were still in the minority when gingrich was elected. The second was to transform society and societal ideas. He was very ambitious. It was not for him just about passing legislation. It was about changing society and the way Society Worked and the way people thought and it was a bold objective that he had and the third was to increase his personal influence either within congress or outside of it. Now this, im going to go through briefly im going to list the tables that sort of outline what gingrich took during the three congresses. Im not going to go through all of them, but ill highlight a couple in each of the congresss that we look at in the paper. It is the first in which hes elected and there is a series of things that hes doing that we argue fit the definition of a strategic entrepreneur, trying to achieve one or more of his goals. A couple of things ill note about this particular congress, one is from the very get go he was identified by reporters as someone who was assertive in trying to achieve a republican majority, so here, for example, is an excerpt from an article that came in may of 1979 entitled those militant gop freshmen and hes one of those militant gop freshmen who was identified in this article and not long after he is elected and the other thing i would note is that and ill come back to the subject, gingrich memos. He wrote memos to staff and he wrote memos to other members and from the get go, he is talking about winning a majority and talking about strategies and this is an excerpt from a memo, the strategic Republican Program and whats the very first thing . Theyve got to win a majority. Thats the first thing theyve got to do. Everything flows from that. In his next congress, the 97th congress whats happened is as you know, Ronald Reagan has been elected president and the republicans have taken a majority in the senate. The republicans have one seat in the house and they have a large minority, but theyre still in the minority. So gingrich is doing a number of things that we argue fit the description of political entrepreneur. A couple of things i do want to point to in detail and the first is an attempt to oust speaker tip oneal between the november 1980 election and the election for speaker in january and the opposition in the reagan budget and tax bill. The attempt to oust oneal is sort of interesting. This is an effort to convince conservative democrats to vote with republicans for an alternative candidate. Theres some potential and folks like Sonny Montgomery of mississippi as a possible candidate and this appears to get from the Archival Research and its a pretty serious effort by gingrich to the point that theres even a list thats put together of current or expected chairmen of committees and its not here in this slide, but a list of possible alternatives who would be given the positions of being chairs of committees if this plan were to succeed and half of the committees were chaired by republicans and the other half by conservative democrats. Needless to say this is not work and one could argue that this is gingrich not so much interested in any of these goals because if it works the republicans have a procedural majority and they dont need to take over the house and one of the things that he writes in one of his memos, this is winwin for us because if it doesnt work then people will at least know that the democrats are the majority in the house and that theme of party differentiation is very important as a strategic objective for gingrich and he wants the public to know there are two parties, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party and the folks in charge in the house are the democrats and so they should be blamed for anything that goes wrong in the house of representatives. Then in 1982 geng rich initiates an effort to defeat reagans budget tax proposal and this is when deficits start to grow and the Reagan White House is getting nervous and theyre negotiating with the republican white house, and to raise taxeses and gingrich quite openly opposes that and they try to get enough votes to defeat it. If you think about it, it is a bold move for a secondterm republican in the house of representatives to go against Ronald Reagan and the president of the United States on his own budget and tax proposal, but again, this is about party differentiation. Yes, gingrich opposed taxes and tax increases and also, this would muddle the picture base then people wouldnt know that democrats stand for raising taxes and republicans stand for lowering them and so he tries to defeat this. For the remainder of the time i want to the talk about gingrichs Third Congress from 1983 to 1984 because this is appearing when gingrich takes some initiatives to expand his resources or strengthen the resources he has in order to achieve his strategic objectives. First of all, in 1983, he forms the conservative Opportunity Society which is a group of about a dozen likeminded republicans in the house who agree with gingrich that the party needs to take more assertive actions to differentiate the parties, to try to embarrass democrats in the hopes of winning the house of representatives. In terms of cos, this is a key strategic resource for gingrich and one of the things that comes through in communications in gingrichs office, and in memoirs that have been written by gingrich is that the staff were worried that gingrich was overextending himself and he was trying to do all these things for the party and what cos did is it allowed for these to be taken on by multiple members so that gingrich didnt spread himself too thin. This was a group endeavor. Gingrich is talked about as the father of cos or even the cos and i think thats a misleading account and its important to remember that it consisted of a number of republicans that either came up with ideas on their own or had other ways to help achieve the groups goals and this included folks like jed greg, connie mack, Robert Walker and vin weber. The other final thing to note is 1983 it spends most of its time to figure out what it is, exactly and what it wants to do. So they make an effort to survey ranking members and what was on your agenda and what would you like to accomplish and they hold a conference in 1983 in baltimore and for republicans to come and talk about what is the party and what do we stand for and this kind of thing . And then near the end of 1993 there was a discussion about members about what to do the following year. So for instance, eddie my, junior, an important republican consultant at the time puts together a memo which he sends to gingrich and webber talking about what can happen early in the following year and he mentions among other things, we need something to do early in the session that gets attention and particularly attention to issues that are popular with the public, but that democrats in the house are using their agenda to keep from being voted on and that is exactly what they do and just a brief mention on memos, one of the things that jeff and i found on doing Archival Research, he loved to write memos and they werent your usual memos and theyre detailed and theyre odd ishs in scope. Theyre broad and they talk about not just winning elections and changing society as a whole and they also really liked pictures and circles and squares, triangles and these are efforts to help people visualize whats going on in his head and thinking about how to achieve these broad goals. So finally, in 1984, cos begins an Aggressive Campaign in the house to bring attention to various issues. To some extent this is obstruction, but i would say more importantly, it was as i said bringing attention to issues. Cspan is recognized as an important avenue for republicans and back ventures to get attention to what they think are important issues and causes. So cos members begin using unanimous consent agreements. One minute special order speeches to basically say, look, we stand for balanced Budget Amendment and lineitem veto and prayer in schools, why dont the democrats bring up these issues . Whats wrong with the party . This is what they would later call water torture and it annoyed the democratic leadership and it culminated in a major event which happens in may of 1984 when gingrich and cos allies went to the floor and read excerpts from the memo as a former gingrich staffer that talks about the problems with the Democratic Partys Foreign Policy and alleges that theyre in effect, helping the enemies of america communist regimes and so forth, so members names are mentioned and its vague whether those members got enough advanced notice to go to the floor to defend themselves and it angers a lot of democrats. In the end it culminates with the point of personal privilege and he goes to the floor to defend himself and Newt Gingrich is there. Tip oneal is also there as speaker and he is clearly upset if you watch the cspan video which i highly recommend you watch the whole period because theres a lot of words exchanged from a lot of members, but early on, oneal gets to the floor and says this is the lowest thing ive ever seen in my 32 years in congress and those words are taken down which is a very rare thing to happen so the speaker, in effect, has been told what youre saying on the floor is out of order and this gets coverage in all the networks and all of the major newspapers. Now all of this sort of thing which then continues throughout the rest of 1984 does lead to minor procedural changes and the democrats limit what republicans can do and more importantly it gives Newt Gingrich and the society tremendous attention in the press which is part of what gingrich and his allies want. They want attention to what theyre doing because they want to tell the American People we are the better party and we in the minority can fix things if you make us a majority party. They kept track of speaking wen, and this is not haphazard and this is very much an organized type of effort, and you can also see that in the aggregate and this is the number of floor appearances by Newt Gingrich and 19 84, bump up, why . Because it was a use of one minute and special order speeches which is what cos is doing and as far as attention, this is data that shows a number of mentions by 1984 compared to Robert Michael,