Sarah Palin: Establishment is trying to “crucify” Newt Gingrich

Do people really want to have a serious debate on Gingrich’s record?

In 1985, he called President Reagan’s rapprochement with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev potentially “the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Chamberlain in 1938 at Munich.”
(…)
True enough, but in politics deeds speak louder than words. And Newt Gingrich’s deeds all too often do not match his words. Since entering Congress, Gingrich has repeatedly voted for big government, deficit spending, welfare, foreign aid, regulatory intervention, and socialism. He has repeatedly voted to send U.S. taxpayer dollars to communist countries and to grant communist tyrannies such as Red China and the Soviet Union most favored nation (MFN) trade status, while demanding trade sanctions against South Africa.

Newt Gingrich’s rating on the Conservative Index (CI) of THE NEW AMERICAN, while better than many other members of Congress, is far from the stellar rating you would expect from one heralded as “the theoretician in chief” of the conservatives in Congress. His CI ratings for his eight terms in office have fluctuated between fairly good to mediocre to abysmal:

96th Congress: 84
97th Congress: 77
98th Congress: 74
99th Congress: 80
100th Congress: 80
101st Congress: 57
102nd Congress: 60
103rd Congress: 78

The following sample of votes shows only some of the many decidedly unconservative votes Gingrich has cast:

Welfare Madness. During his 16 years in Congress, Gingrich has inveighed vociferously against the evils of the New Deal/Great Society welfare state — while voting for every kind of welfare program imaginable: for the elderly, children, the “homeless,” businessmen, farmers, bankers, leftwing broadcasters, etc. Those votes include: March 21, 1991 — $30 billion to begin the unconstitutional bailout of failed savings and loan institutions; June 26, 1991 — $52.6 billion for agriculture programs, subsidies, and food stamps; October 5, 1992 — $66.5 billion for housing and community development; September 22, 1994 — $250.6 billion in appropriations for the Departments of Labor, HHS, and Education.

Budget-Busting Profligacy. A Balanced Budget Amendment forms the core of the first plank of Gingrich’s “Contract with America.” He has been calling for such a measure and condemning deficit spending ever since coming to Congress. In an early 1982 speech he called on Congress to reject further increases in the National Debt Limit. “Only by using the debt limit as a leverage point” he bravely declared, “can we force the changes which clearly the liberal leadership of this body wants to avoid.” Trouble is, a few months earlier, on February 5, 1981, he had voted with those same “liberals” to raise the National Debt ceiling by another $49.1 billion to $985 billion. He has gone this same route many times since.

Of course, raising the debt ceiling would not have been necessary had he practiced what he preached. His votes against “more frugal government” include: December 21, 1987 — $603.9 billion for 13 regular appropriation bills larded with many wasteful, extravagant, and unconstitutional items (it passed by a vote of 209 to 208); May 4, 1989 — outlays of $1.165 trillion and a deficit of $99 billion for a dishonest and spendthrift 1990 budget designed to barely skim in under the Gramm-Rudman $100 billion deficit limit; March 10, 1994 — a vote against a responsible amendment offered by Representative Gerald Solomon (R-NY) to balance the budget by 1999 through $698 billion in spending cuts (a mere 3.5 percent cut) over five years.

Considering these and other votes against sound fiscal policy, it is not surprising that Gingrich’s spendthrift ways have carried over into his personal finances. The 1992 House banking scandal revealed that he had run 22 overdrafts on his checking account, and this in spite of having voted himself a huge pay raise and having a taxpayer-provided, chauffeur-driven car. Nor is it surprising that his rating from the National Taxpayers Union during the latest session of Congress (the 103rd) was a meager 75 percent. His tax-and-spend record over the years on votes tabulated by Tax Reform IMmediately (TRIM) has so often contradicted his rhetoric that National Director of TRIM James Tort was prompted to remark: “Professor Gingrich hopefully will never be called upon to teach a course in the proper role of our federal government. His rare votes against bloated big government usually have been prompted by the partisan wrangling of the moment, not by any great respect for, or understanding of, the Constitution.”

Foreign Aid. If there is anything more unpopular, unconstitutional, counterproductive, fiscally irresponsible, and immoral than welfare for domestic freeloaders, it is welfare for foreign freeloaders. But the “tight-fisted” Mr. Gingrich consistently votes to send U.S. tax dollars to kleptocrats and tyrants abroad: June 27, 1990 — $15.7 billion in foreign aid for fiscal 1991; June 20 1991 — $12.4 billion for fiscal 1992 and $13 billion for fiscal 1993; June 25, 1992 — $13.8 billion for fiscal 1993; August 6, 1992 — $12.3 billion for the International Monetary Fund and $1.2 billion for the “republics” of the former Soviet Union; June 17, 1993 — $13 billion for fiscal 1994; September 29, 1993 — $12.9 billion, including $2.5 billion to Russia; August 4, 1994 — $13.8 billion for foreign aid for fiscal 1995.

Eco-Lunacy. Gingrich, a longtime member of the Georgia Conservancy (“an aggressive environmental group comprised largely of upper-middle class urbanites” — Newt’s own words) cofounded by Jimmy Carter, organized one of the early environmental studies programs back in 1970 while a professor at West Georgia State College. According to Current Biography, the success of his early congressional campaigns was due in large part “to the support of environmentalists.” Besides being blatantly unconstitutional, virtually all federal environmental legislation involves gross violations of states’ rights and the property rights of private individuals, both of which Gingrich claims to champion. Newt’s “green” votes include: May 16, 1979 — the -Alaska Lands Bill, locking up 68 million acres as untouchable “wilderness”; December 17, 1987 — $307 million for continuation of the fraudulent and unconstitutional Endangered Species Act, putting the “rights” of owls, bugs, rats, snakes, and newts above those of people; March 28, 1990 — elevating the unconstitutional Environmental Protection Agency to Cabinet-level status; May 23, 1990 — the badly misnamed Clean Air bill, requiring radical cuts in industry and automobile emissions, adding tens of billions of dollars annually in new costs to our already stringent and costly air standards.

Federalizing Education. The Communist Manifesto calls for nationalizing education, while the U.S. Constitution, to the contrary, prohibits federal involvement in educational matters. These votes cause one to wonder which document’s philosophy is guiding Newt Gingrich’s education policy decisions: May 10, 1979 — for creation of the new Cabinet-level Department of Education demanded by President Carter and the radical National Education Association; May 9, 1989 — $1.4 billion in federal aid for “applied technology education,” the new federalese for vocational education; May 16, 1990 — $2.9 billion for Head Start and Follow Through programs for fiscal 1991, rising to $7.7 billion in 1994; July 20, 1990 — $1.1 billion for a variety of education programs, none of which the federal government has authority to fund; May 12, 1994 — “such sums as may be necessary” for the $3.3 billion-per-year Head Start program and $2.6 billion for fiscal 1995 for three low-income and child abuse prevention

http://web.archive.org/web/20070101203017/http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/1994/vo10no25.htm

And this was written in 1994. Maybe someone from the “establishment” time traveled.

joana on January 27, 2012 at 7:12 PM