Schroeder: I hope they don't buy into his power. I think power for power's sake is wrong and I think that's why Newt's ratings are falling so rapidly. I think the American people understand that Congress is a messy process. That's because it's a bloody difficult country to hold together. We just looked at Canada almost blown apart to the north of us. Who expected that? This Congress was really not about having a king speaker or a boss speaker. It really is about trying to put together a consensus that somehow is going to be as fair in Denver, Colorado as it is in Anchorage, as it is in wherever.

All the wisdom in the world doesn't come out of the speaker's district and out of the speaker's mind. I know how to do that. It's no secret. Everybody knows how to do that. Back in the 1800s we had some speakers that acted like that, but they were rebellions. This country decided that they didn't want that anymore. I don't think that just because you can do that and just because it's efficient. I can give you a lot of governments that are really efficient, but I don't think the American people are going to sign up for them. I think it's a good way to only breed more and more discontent with the government.

Q: We came close to the edges of a question that has been central to Newt's recent [centrality] of the matter of ethics. Jeff Eisenach, one of his long-time aides --we were talking to him about the whole business of the ethics charges against the speaker. His exact words, I think, were, 'Monkey see monkey do.' Newt did it against them. And now, of course, they're turning around just trying to play the same game with Newt. How much of it is genuine ethical questions and how much of it is 'that's the biggest guy on the other side of the hill?'

Schroeder: Look, I'm a lawyer by trade, and the one thing I know is that you don't draw conclusions without having seen the facts. The only thing I know is there's six or seven ethics charges piled up at the door of the ethics committee. And we've now waited eleven months and nothing's happened. In every other instance the Ethics Committee has moved and gotten an outside council to investigate them. That's the normal procedure. And I think that the speaker should be just as subject to the normal procedure as any member. I think the problem is that the Ethics Committee has not acted on these. They've really been kind of stonewalling them and the stench starts to grow. If there is nothing then why not move towards getting a special council on them? Why allow this to back up and have a cloud over the whole capital, which is what we're getting by not acting on that.

So, that's my thing. I don't know how you try a case if you haven't heard the case. I haven't heard the case. But I do know that there's a lot of stuff over there at the front door. Denial is not a river in Egypt. It is a thing going on down in the House of Representative's Ethics Committee --they are in a total state of denial about everything that's backed up at the door.

Q: I asked you earlier, I wanted to ask you about your work in the Armed Services Committee. It is an area in which Newt has been involved almost from the time he arrived in Congress. There is a sense, we have picked up from speaking to military people, that Newt is either author or co-author of our military view. I'd like to ask you, first of all, how much credit do you think Newt personally should get for the nature of our military and its recent success in terms of its efficiency and, in general, its standing in the American mind?

Schroeder: Newt's never served on the Armed Services Committee. He never served in the Armed Services. His military record and mine are exactly the same. To now suddenly perceive him as the master stroke behind all of this --I don't think so.

He is the author, I guess, of this tremendous budget of defense, even more than the Joint Chiefs asked for. This Congress never did that even during the Cold War. You have the President, the Joint Chiefs, the Pentagon budget. And they said, 'that's not enough; we're going to add another eight billion,' at the same time that we're pulling money out of college loans for students and Head-start and everything else. We're going to add eight billion. And it's all for weapon systems. No one ever knows when we're going to use them. B2 bombers, nuclear submarines, deploy Star Wars. You didn't see any of that stuff in the Gulf War, you didn't see it in Somalia, you won't see it in Bosnia if we go in there.

I think it's a big pay back time for military contractors. His district has more defense and federal money shoe-horned than any place in America. It's interesting that he hates government spending except in his district. I think if you mean he's really pushed these add-ons, that even the Pentagon didn't want, to pay back contractors -- yes.

Q: There was the sense that he, along with Gary Hart of Colorado and others, literally helped sort of map out what the military should be and that's probably not your...

Schroeder: That is revisionist history. Gary Hart and many others, including myself --there was a reform military caucus that was in there. But I never remember seeing Newt around it or playing any kind of an important role in it at that time. He was out busy throwing bombs all over the floor and screaming and yelling at people.