[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 130 (Saturday, August 5, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1684-E1685]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


       DOES THE RIGHT HAND KNOW WHAT THE FAR RIGHT HAND IS DOING?

                                 ______


                           HON. BARNEY FRANK

                            of massachusetts

                    in the house of representatives

                         Friday, August 4, 1995
  Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, I have been puzzled recently 
by Speaker Gingrich's actions in certain regards. In particular, he 
seems to me to have been engaged in flirtations with some of the more 
extreme, unreasonable conspiracy theories that rattle around the right 
wing these days--for example, his support of the manner in which the 
Waco hearings were conducted and his refusal to accept the conclusion 
of several independent investigators that Vince Foster was a suicide. 
We also have the erratic way in which the House is being run these 
days, with important legislation being considered in the middle of the 
night, with debate and votes separated, and with the general sense of 
discombobulation.
  A recent column by Robert Novak in the Washington Post suggests some 
of the reasons--the Speaker, having benefited greatly from the energies 
of the very conservative elements that helped him take control of the 
Republican Party now is bothered by their insistence on his paying 
attention to their agenda. Since Mr. Novak has long been one of the in-
house historians for the right wing in America, his discussion of the 
Speaker's rage at those on the right, and his frustration over his 
inability completely to control them explains a great deal. Because I 
think it is useful for people to be able to understand some of the 
puzzling things that have been happening in the House recently, which 
are otherwise inexplicable, I think it very useful that Mr. Novak's 
article be reprinted here.
                       Anger at the Dinner Table

                          (By Roger D. Novak)

       After spending three hours behind closed doors with the 
     House Ethics Committee answering nuisance allegations by the 
     Democratic leadership, Newt Gingrich last Thursday night 
     erupted in anger at the dinner table--against his friends, 
     not his enemies.
       The speaker of the House was the guest at a dinner hosted 
     by R. Emmett Tyrrell, editor of the American Spectator, and 
     attended mainly by conservative journalists. The immediate 
     cause for Gingrich's ire was my column that day suggesting 
     that he and other Republicans were flinching on affirmative 
     action. But his complaints were much broader.
       For the first time in the 104th Congress, the speaker 
     seemed at bay. His ill humor, his own aides said, was in no 
     small part the product of fatigue. But beyond that, Gingrich 
     is vexed with conservatives, inside and outside the House, 
     who are crossing him on the highly charged issues of race and 
     abortion. A major political leader is in grave danger when he 
     assails his base.
       Gingrich's aides, who had never seen him as out of control 
     for so sustained a period as he was last Thursday night, 
     attribute it to an unbelievably heavy work load. Republican 
     colleagues in the House, at the point of exhaustion trying to 
     enact their revolutionary program, wonder how their leader 
     fulfills that schedule while also running a shadow campaign 
     for president and promoting his best-selling book,
       Fatigue can be cured by a little rest. Gingrich's bigger 
     problem lies with the ideological heart of his party. His 
     long-time supporter and sometime critic, conservative 
     activist Paul Weyrich, worries that Gingrich is following the 
     bad example of the Reagan White House in setting parameters 
     of permissible conservatism.
       In effect, the speaker is saying: Nobody can be to the 
     right of me and be respectable. From the speaker's office 
     come complaints that conservative congressmen want him to 
     force passage of proposals that do not command a majority in 
     the House.
       At the American Spectator dinner, historian Gingrich 
     compared the course of Republicans in Congress today to the 
     way U.S. forces temporarily bogged down in France in 1944 
     after the Normandy landing. Democratic defenders of big 
     government, he said, are fighting for their lives. This is a 
     struggle of seven-day weeks and 16-hour days. But unlike his 
     hero, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, 

[[Page E1685]]

     Gingrich feels he is facing fire from his own troops.
       His voice rising, the speaker pointed to journalists at the 
     table and said they were acting like, well, like journalists. 
     He was ``infuriated,'' he said, by my column on affirmative 
     action and asserted that I was wrong in saying his book, ``To 
     Renew America,'' does not mention the subject. (He cited a 
     two-page chapter on ``Individual Versus Group Rights'' that 
     never mentions affirmative action or quotas or proposes a 
     specific solution.)
       Gingrich went on to repeat what Jack Kemp said: that 
     Republicans will rue a race-based campaign for president in 
     1996. He angrily lamented that black Republicans feel they 
     are losing a golden opportunity to bring African Americans 
     into the party. He described fears of such blacks as his 
     Georgia congressional colleague and fighter for civil rights 
     in the '60s, Rep. John Lewis, and warned against instilling 
     apprehension about ``resegregation.''
       Warming to his subject, Gingrich complained about 
     conservatives bringing the party to ruin by opposing a rape-
     and-incest exception to federally financed abortions (another 
     subject he avoids confronting directly in his book). He did 
     not say so, but word has spread that he will cast a rare vote 
     (the speaker usually does not vote) on the rape-and-incest 
     exception.
       In less than eight months, Gingrich has established himself 
     potentially as one of the most powerful and effective 
     speakers in the nation's history. He is unquestionably the 
     most visionary and charismatic figure in the Republican 
     Party. But the strain of ``renewing America'' is showing.
       He seems more tolerant of the 25 or so House Republican 
     moderates who oppose key elements of the party program than 
     of some 200 conservatives who feel deeply about reverse 
     discrimination and abortion on demand. That is not how the 
     Republican majority was built, and it is not how it can be 
     maintained.
     

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