With Democrats having the slimmest House majority in a century and midterm elections historically favoring the party opposite from the president, Republicans are well positioned to flip the House in 2022.
That makes this the perfect time, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich thinks, for Republicans to craft “Contract with America” 2.0.
“For the first time since ‘94, I would advocate a Contract with America,” Gingrich told to the Republican Study Committee, the largest conservative caucus in the House, in a closed-door meeting on Wednesday. The Washington Examiner was in the room.
Gingrich famously spearheaded the brief 10-point policy document pledge revealed during campaign season in 1994 that was signed by more than 300 Republican incumbents and challengers. It is often credited with pushing Republicans to a sweeping midterm victory that year: Republicans gained 54 seats, flipped the House for the first time in 40 years, and made Gingrich speaker.
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But the goal is not necessarily not to use a new Contract with America to shore up a 2022 victory. It is to cement conservatism in the party in 2023 and lay the groundwork for the 2024 and 2026 elections.
Gingrich recalled that now-Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer once wrote: “The real purpose of the contract was not to win the election. It was to radicalize the House Republicans.”
“He was right,” Gingrich said. “I thought we had a good chance to win. … The last thing I wanted was for them to arrive here for a normal Congress, show up for a day or two, go back home, get to know all the lobbyists, end up being totally normal. And I didn’t spend my lifetime to elect a normal Congress.”
Because of the contract, Gingrich was able to pressure an unnamed Republican committee chair to report several items out of his committee despite confessing to Gingrich after the election that he actually opposed those measures on the contract that he signed.
Under the leadership of Indiana Rep. Jim Banks, chairman of the Republican Study Committee for this congressional session, the group has increased its profile and brought a number of high-profile speakers and potential 2024 candidates to speak to members: former Vice President Mike Pence, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley.
But the committee is also working on defining a list of conservative policy proposals that will be ready to bring up if Republicans win back the House in 2022. Earlier this year, the Republican Study Committee crafted a sample federal budget that would reduce total spending by $14.4 trillion over a decade and balance the budget in five years.
The House Republican Conference has also formed seven issue-based task forces to develop policy proposals, with the same idea in mind.
So what, exactly, would be in the new 10-point plan, or however-many-point plan? That is still in flux.
“It takes real conversations,” Gingrich said. “Everybody, including our candidates, go home and hold town hall meetings in March, April, May, so that people tell you what they think of your contract. That’s so transactionally, they get the notion that we’re trying to grow it from the grassroots up, not impose it from Washington down.”
Buy-in from Republicans on the state and local level is key to success, Gingrich said.
One strategy that he sees as being successful is hammering “big government socialism.”
“God looked down upon us favorably and got every single Democrat in the House and Senate to vote for a Bernie Sanders-inspired bill,” Gingrich said, referring to Democrats’ go-it-alone “Build Back Better” budget reconciliation spending bill. “You’re not going to get a clearer ability to talk about big government socialism than having an opponent who has voted for Bernie Sanders’s $5.5 trillion bill.”
The reconciliation bill is currently being cut down amid negotiations with centrist Democrats in the Senate who oppose the original $3.5 trillion price tag and has not received a final Senate vote.
“Every time you get in an elevator with a Democrat, say, ‘Thank you,’” Gingrich said. “I think you have a Margaret Thatcher opportunity to actually drive them into a corner.”
This would not be the first time that Gingrich and Republicans a new version of the famous 1994 “contract.” In 2010, Republicans released a 21-page “Pledge to America.” Gingrich during his 2012 presidential campaign released a “21st Century Contract with America” plan — also part of the title of his 2005 book.
Members of Congress aren’t the only ones meeting with Gingrich about a new slate of policy plans to carry Republicans through the midterm elections and beyond.
Former President Donald Trump, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham reportedly met with Gingrich earlier this year to come up with a Contract with America-like list of policy proposals for the 2022 campaign season. A narrowly defined list of the policy proposals making up the Republican national agenda would be a contrast from 2020, when Republicans did not bother to craft a new national policy platform and voted to extend its 2016 document.
In a way, it could cement the former president’s “Make America Great Again” stamp on the Republican Party. But as Gingrich describes it, he sees a new contract as a way to “end the Roosevelt era” once and for all after a century.
And it is also a way to tamp down on internal divisions within the Republican Party and rogue actors.
“I am all for keeping the base excited as long as you do it in coordination with the leadership,” Gingrich said. “Figure out what can excite the base that the leadership can also support because the Washington press corps loves nothing better than to get us involved in a civil war.”
Gingrich said that former Republican House Speaker John Boehner, who resigned in 2015 after many battles with the staunch conservative wing of his conference and the Freedom Caucus, did not manage that problem well.
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“If you don’t give activists rabbits to chase, they will invent their own rabbits, and very often the rabbit will be disruptive,” Gingrich said. “The people who helped drive Boehner out of office didn’t do the Republican Party any good. And they may have felt like it was a lot of fun, but it was It wasn’t smart, and it didn’t get us anywhere.”
He also critiqued former Republican Speaker Paul Ryan: “Ryan wasn’t trained in being speaker. He didn’t understand being speaker.”
Gingrich lasted four years as speaker, falling hard after his dramatic rise, representing a suburban Atlanta district in the House for 20 years and then being third in line for presidential succession. Gingrich resigned under pressure in November 1998 after Republicans lost seats in the midterm elections amid GOP lawmakers’ push to impeach Democratic President Bill Clinton.
Still, Gingrich on Wednesday expressed his approval of current House Republican leadership. Republican Whip Steve Scalise, a former Republican Study Committee chairman, was in Wednesday’s meeting and listened to Gingrich intently.
“I’m very fond of Kevin since he was a staffer,” Gingrich said of Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. “And I think Steve is remarkable. I really think you’ve got a great team in leadership across the board.”
