Word: congress
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Clinton whose job was on the line. The next it was Gingrich. But the surprising election of 1998 did more than take a load off one man's shoulders and put it on another's till he dropped. It brought home that all year the governing majority in Congress has done just about anything but govern. From the moment in January that Monica Lewinsky became as famous as Michael Jordan, official Washington and its media auxiliary have been transfixed by the President's sex drive. And for a while, who wasn't? But in time most people moved back...
...message. It was two words: Shut up! So the election that was supposed to be another G.O.P. blowout ended with a gain of five House seats for the Democrats, no change in the Senate and the morning-after spectacle of dumbstruck Republicans. They will still rule the next Congress, but with nothing like the headlong confidence they brought there after their triumph in 1994, when they knew in their bones that they were the party with a direct channel to the majority will. What most Americans these days appear to want is reasonable safeguards for a personal well-being that...
...promise, and a warning. Both men believed in the politics of punishment, and by the time their paths crossed in that twilight at the White House, each had shown his capacity for pain. Gingrich's 16 years on the back benches as the most hated member of Congress did not break his heart or his will: when he became Speaker, he promised he would remake the world in the first 100 days. The first thing most voters learned about Clinton was how hard it was to kill him, as he slogged through New Hampshire in 1992, no voice, no sleep...
When Newt Gingrich and his self-proclaimed revolutionaries took power after the 1994 elections, they passed the so-called gift ban, a deliberately draconian law that prohibits members of Congress and their staffs from accepting gifts of any value -- even a cup of coffee -- from lobbyists, journalists and contributors. Another reform: Gingrich placed six-year term limits on all committee chairmen. But in the days since Newt announced his resignation, his presumptive heir, Bob Livingston of Louisiana, has been peppered with furtive requests from fellow Republicans who want to turn back the reform clock. The total gift ban, they argue...
Costa points out the contrast between the news images of Iraqis obediently applauding Saddam Hussein and those of the United States Congress, where opinions are exchanged freely and sometimes rudely, he says...