They gathered to celebrate the signing of the ‘Contract with America’ 30 years ago and the friendships that came along with it.
Washington, D.C. – Lindsey Graham was feeling sentimental.
On Capitol Hill, “it’s so easy to talk about why the other person sucks,” the South Carolina senator told his fellow 1994 freshman House classmates last Friday inside National Statuary Hall. “Eventually, you need to tell people what you’re for.” Today’s Republican politicians could learn a thing or two from former speaker Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America,” he said. After reminding the American people “how bad things are,” he continued, “we need to talk about how good they could be.”
Graham was trying to recapture the magic of the 1994 midterm elections, when, after uniting under the Contract with America, Republicans picked up 54 seats in the House and eight seats in the Senate – flipping the upper chamber, wresting away control from Democrats in the lower chamber for the first time in 40 years, and delivering the speaker’s gavel to Gingrich.
Two days after the current House of Representatives departed Washington for its long fall recess, GOP members from the freshman class of 1994 convened inside the Capitol to celebrate the signing of that contract 30 years ago, and the friendships that came along with it. (Funny enough, the most recognizable member of the 1994 bunch was arguably Joe Scarborough, the former Florida Republican congressman whose Morning Joe show on MSNBC has become a must-watch television program in Joe Biden’s White House.)
Speaker after speaker at last Friday’s shindig spoke in nostalgic terms about the Gingrich era. They praised the GOP’s success in balancing the budget for four years — thanks to a GOP-controlled House and Senate, as well as political buy-in from a Democratic president whose sex scandal Gingrich later urged Republicans to talk about nonstop on the campaign trail.
Never mind that this Contract for America agenda helped Gingrich cling to the gavel only until November 1998, when a lackluster midterm showing for Republicans exacerbated existing rifts within the House GOP conference over his leadership, prompting him to step down from power.
Those decades-old frustrations over his governing style didn’t make their way to the podium last week. Here inside the Capitol on Friday, Republicans sang his praises. So ingrained is the Contract with America reverence within the contemporary GOP psyche that even former speaker Kevin McCarthy spearheaded his own “Commitment to America” spinoff ahead of the 2022 midterms — a little more than a year before eight dissident GOP members of the House joined a united Democratic caucus in giving him the boot.
These days, of course, the House GOP is under the reins of Speaker Mike Johnson, who has faced threats to his own speakership over budget and foreign-aid-related legislation.
“The biggest problem this Congress has is the fact that the Democrats have a majority in the Senate and the White House,” said former Representative David McIntosh (R., Ind.), who now serves as president of the Club for Growth. In the Gingrich years, McIntosh added: “We had a majority in the House and the Senate, so we could get legislation onto the president’s desk, and when it was politically popular, he signed it. So that’s the biggest challenge that I think they’re facing.”
Combine that divided government with a bare House GOP majority — one that’s home to a band of intransigent GOP members who love nothing more than to buck Republican leadership at every turn — and what do you get? Chaos and gridlock.
Even Gingrich, no stranger to ungovernable members during his own tenure, seems to genuinely feel for Speaker Johnson, the formerly low-profile Louisianan who received a round of applause here Friday afternoon in his absence. It’s hard for even a roomful of power-hungry former lawmakers to envy the position in which Johnson finds himself roughly eleven months into the job, having successfully batted away threats to his speakership as he stares down a potential Democratic takeover of the House this November.
Back in April, Gingrich wrote in a social-media post that Johnson was “working to lead the most complicated House since the Civil War.” He feels the same way now.
“I could never do what Mike Johnson is doing,” the Georgia Republican told the class of 1994 on Friday. “I can lead a charge. I am pretty good on offense.” But the “amount of time he has to spend listening to idiots” within the House GOP conference is beyond what most former speakers can handle. Gingrich added that his party’s comfortable majorities in 1994 and 1996 meant that he could afford eight or ten GOP defections on any big pieces of legislation.
Not so with Speaker Johnson’s majority. “When you realize there are at least 14 Republicans who wake up every morning and say: ‘I’m voting no, what’s the topic?’” Gingrich said, it’s “almost impossible” to govern.
This is not to say he believes the party ought to dispense with the confrontational and bitterly partisan style of Republican politicking that Gingrich famously helped spearhead three decades ago. Yes, this Georgia Republican has grown more soft-spoken with age. But he’s still the same old speaker who loves to dunk on Democrats and field questions from a gaggle of reporters who were plainly awestruck by his use of the term “idiots” to describe the vote-no caucus in today’s House GOP.
Now “why,” one reporter wanted to know after the event, “do you think so many Republicans vote against the party?”
“The difference is he has a four-vote margin,” Gingrich said of Johnson’s predicament. To change the dynamics of the lower chamber, the current speaker needs two things. One, a bigger margin, and two, he must “find a way to break up this idea” that being a thorn in House GOP leadership’s side is “somehow a success. It’s not.”