SHIELDS & GIGOT DECEMBER 27, 1996 TRANSCRIPT

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This week our regular commentators, syndicated columnist Mark Shields and Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot, discuss the troubles surrounding Speaker Newt Gingrich and the future relationship between President Clinton and the Republican Congress.

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A RealAudio version of this NewsHour segment is available. December 23, 1996 Reps. Peter King (R-NY) and Martin Frost (D-TX) debate Speaker Newt Gingrich's future in Congress. December 20, 1996 Shields & Gigot discuss President Clinton's new cabinet picks and ethics charges against Newt Gingrich. November 22, 1996 Shields & Gigot discuss the return of Newt Gingrich and Richard Gephardt to head their respective parties in the House and the growing furor over financing. Browse the Online NewsHour's congressional converage. Browse past segments with Shields & Gigot.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Now end-of-the-week political analysis with Shields & Gigot. That’s syndicated columnist Mark Shields and Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot. Hello to both of you.

MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist: Merry Christmas.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Paul, last weekend, Newt Gingrich acknowledged that he had brought discredit on the House by violating House Ethics Rules. Is his position as speaker in jeopardy?

PAUL GIGOT, Wall Street Journal: I think that so far, despite a little erosion on the journalistic right, the political right, itself, the House members, themselves, seem to be holding quite, quite firm in support of the speaker, saying that he admitted mistakes but that this is, in essence, a kind of speeding ticket or reckless driving ticket, and doesn’t warrant the departure or censure from the speakership. But I think one--frankly, one big ally that the speaker has right now is David Bonior, the Democratic Whip in the House from Michigan, his great tormentor, who couldn’t resist when the news came out, couldn’t resist going to the press room of the House and saying tax fraud and lying and must be gone, and that had the effect I think of saying, wait a minute, are we going to elect our speaker, the Republicans say, are we going to elect our speaker, or are we going to--might as well vote--let it be dictated by the Democrats, let’s just vote for Dick Gephardt and cut out the middle man, if that’s the case. And I think that has the effect, frankly, of uniting Republicans. He probably should have stayed out of it, Mr. Bonior should have.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: How do you see it? Do you think that his--there’s a vote January 7th, and they will be voting for Speaker in the House. Do you think that he’ll be elected?

MARK SHIELDS: I honestly don’t know. The Speaker’s had a bad week. Paul’s right. He lost Bill Saphire, the conservative columnist at The New York Times. The editorial--

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Who called for him to step aside.

MARK SHIELDS: --called for him to step aside. The editorial comments have not been good, have not been helpful, the conservative newspapers across the country. And I think what the speaker--I think the speaker reached his high water mark last weekend. I thought they brilliantly organized this let’s get behind the speaker, and the speaker used a defense which I haven’t heard for about 25 years in politics, which is called--it’s the Murray Chotner defense, which is you always deny what they never criticized before, so that’s a way of attacking, in other words, the first reaction was, the speaker didn’t make any money on this. Nobody had charged the speaker of making money on it, but so you throw up that smoke screen. And then they came with what I think really will turn out to be the Achilles heel in the Gingrich defense. They said the speaker was naive. The speaker said he was naive.

Now, Newt Gingrich is a lot of things. He is a superb organizer. He is a very, very cunning political strategist. He’s brilliant. Naive is not a word that anybody who’s been around the speaker for more than 10 minutes associates with him. Now today we learned in the Atlanta Constitution that he did, in fact, receive legal advice, tax advice, that this was not the proper thing to do, that what he was doing in mixing charitable educational funds, contributions with political was wrong. He said that he apologized for not seeking that advice. I think the longer it goes, the worse it looks for the speaker. He’s now up to eight Republicans in the House who have publicly said that they’re not ready to commit to him, and I think it’s not--it’s not been a good week for him, and the best thing that’s happened for him, it’s happened over Christmas, when people, this is a slow news time, there isn’t the usual megaphone going on in Washington, but I don’t think it’s been good.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: How long is it likely to go on? Tell us what happens next.

PAUL GIGOT: Absolutely as long as the Democrats can keep it going.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: In other words, they want to prevent a vote before, they want to prevent a meeting which would decide on a penalty before January 7th.

PAUL GIGOT: Right, but because the speaker has essentially agreed to the charges laid out in the subcommittee report and now you don’t have a hearing about whether or not he was guilty, so you go to the penalty phase right away, and that means a full committee meeting of the Ethics Committee. But the same Democrats on the committee who spent all last year saying, you know, slow down, they’re trying to put it off and put it off, now say, wait a minute, you’re going too fast, because they understand if you can keep this up, it doesn’t help the Republicans to have this be the story of the Congress. It diminishes Congress, hurts its records, so I think they’ll try to put it off as long as they can. I don’t know how long they can put it off since you really should settle this thing before too long, but they’ll certainly mess up the first day and try to make life as difficult as possible for the Republicans. And then I think what you have is a vote where the Democrats push for censure, and the Republicans probably say let’s go for a reprimand and probably a pretty close to party line vote would be my guess.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Do the Democrats believe they can prevent his election, or are they using this to raise the political stakes of his election?

PAUL GIGOT: Well, I think they feel that--I think they would like to push him from the speakership. I don’t believe the stuff that says, oh, we want him to be there. I think they understand that he is somebody who has--still has appeal to the breadth of the Republican coalition in the House that nobody else who could take his place has and that he’s a pretty good thinker about where the Republicans should go next. So I think they’d like to depose him, but, if they can’t, they’ll throw as many arrows as possible at him as long as they possibly can.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What do you think about the Democratic goals?

MARK SHIELDS: I think there are as many Democratic goals as there are Democrats at this point. I mean, I think there are a number of Democrats who sincerely believe that Newt Gingrich is a diminished voice right now which I think he is. I mean, he always--the speaker was always able to deck his appeal in sort of these moral rhetoric. That’s going to be very difficult for him to do now. I mean, he basically capitulated and admitted the charges against him. I mean, he--you know, he plea bargained last weekend and came up with saying essentially I agree with the charges. The problem the speaker has is he’s used words like "grenades" I mean he’s used them effectively to organize, to put together a political coalition, and he said eight years ago the House should apply to itself the same rules it applies to others. The Iran-Contra investigation was televised in public. The ethics investigation of the speaker should be public. He said that about Jim Wright. Now it’s going to be certainly a strong case. I don’t see how the speaker or his lieutenants can argue that that hearing should not be televised, should not be public, just as it was in the past, just as he argued in the past. In other words, he rode that tiger on the way in, and those words are going to come back to haunt him, and they’re going to be used by Democrats against him. I don’t have any question that there are some Democrats who would like to see him, you know, really suffer in torment and be tossed out, and I think there’s a--I really do--I think as time passes, the chances for that prospect probably do increase.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Paul, if he is elected, is he mortally injured? I noticed that the Rocky Mountain News used--calling for him to step aside--used the word "hobble," that he’d be hobbled if he were elected.

PAUL GIGOT: Well, I don’t think that he’s hobbled. I think that he’s diminished, there’s no question about it. I don’t think that he’ll ever again have the stature that he had in his first two years, but you have to ask yourself what happens if he’s not there. I mean--and the Republicans I talked to think, No. 1, we can’t let the Democrats dictate to us who the speaker will be and really justify this campaign of vilification because it’s not just the ethics charge we’re dealing with here. It’s a lot of television ads that were ran against him. It was making him the focus of the election. And if you do that, do you really think the Democrats are going to say, oh, well, that’s over, let’s let bygones be--Dick Armey you have a free ride, you’re an ethic--no, they’re going to go after Armey, maybe not on the same charges, but they’ll find other things to go after. So this political partisan warfare is not going to end here if that happens. And then the question is: All right. So assume Speaker Gingrich steps down, do you think you have a nice, normal ascension? No. There’s going to be partisan war, in-fighting within the Republican coalition because Tom Delay would like to be speaker and Dick Armey would like to be speaker, and all right down the line, and they thought this was going to be two, four years out. So you could see a Congress that is hobbled for months, not just days.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Briefly, because I want to get in something else.

MARK SHIELDS: I just want to make one point, and that was that the subcommittee finding, which included two stalwart Republicans, Porter Goss and Steve Schiff, New Mexico and Florida, respectively, voted unanimously on this. I mean, it was not--it was not a partisan vendetta, you know, where the Democrats somehow rigged the vote. It was a four-zip vote on these charges against the speaker to which the speaker admitted.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Looking at the congressional White House relations over the past year, turning the corner now to look at the future a bit, what do you think the relations between Congress and the White House will be in the year that is to come?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, I think that the dominant figure on Capitol Hill is certainly Trent Lott, the Senate Republican leader, a rookie freshman Republican leader, just two years ago was a rookie speaker, and I think the relationship between him and Bill Clinton is a fascinating one. Dick Morris, the discredited political consultant, worked for both of them. I think they have a lot in common and very, very much different between them, so I think to a great degree it will be the Clinton-Lott relationship will shape the relations between the two institutions.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: No matter what happens with Gingrich?

MARK SHIELDS: I just think that Gingrich is a diminished figure. I can’t imagine that the speaker would remain in the House if he lost his speakership.

PAUL GIGOT: I agree that Lott is--some of the power flows over to Lott in the Senate. They gained two seats. The House lost nine. That’s a big effect. But I think the most--the fascinating thing I’m going to be looking for that you got some hints from this year is can Bill Clinton continue this incredible tightrope act, which is to run borrowing, as he did very successfully, conservative themes and rhetoric, balanced budget, signed the welfare reform bill, and maintain his Democratic coalition? Because you had a lot of Democrats this past year swallowed their disgust when the President signed the welfare bill. They did it for a practical reason; they wanted to win. But now the President has won, and they still didn’t get the House, and they lost seats in the Senate. Will the President, if he does deals with Republicans in the balanced budget and elsewhere, be able to keep his left wing together? I think that’s a big question.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What do you think about that?

MARK SHIELDS: I think that is a good question. I think there’s no question either that you have to look at the scandals that are unraveling, be it the story of the contribution that followed after a visit to the White House that had to be returned and all the rest of it. I don’t think there’s any question we’re going to have a lot of this for the next year.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Well, Mark and Paul, thanks for being with us. And Happy New Year!

MARK SHIELDS: Happy New Year!

PAUL GIGOT: Same to you.

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