Word: gingriched
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...Gingrich and the newcomers agreed that the gravest threat to the revolution came from the committee chairs. Even with Republicans in control, Gingrich's agenda could easily have been buried by chairmen who were damn well going to exercise the power they had finally won. So he scrapped the seniority system, to install as chairmen members who had proved their fealty, and then he packed the key committees with his acolytes, to make sure the chairmen behaved. He even required all members of the Appropriations Committee to sign an oath of loyalty to the Contract with America as a condition...
...first the system he installed worked wondrously. To much ridicule and skepticism, Gingrich had promised to bring to a vote the 10 items in the Contract during the first 100 days. By that deadline he had actually rammed through everything, with the single exception of term limits. On the few occasions when the freshmen rebelled--as when they pressed for campaign-finance reform--he shut them down with a promise to do it next year. Likewise they had vowed not to rest until they had killed at least three Cabinet agencies, but they are going home for Christmas without even...
...House, particularly the lobbyists who had bankrolled the revolution and expected to be rewarded for it. The National Rifle Association, for instance, contributed $1,442,519 to Republicans in the last election cycle. But when they pushed last spring for an early repeal of the assault-weapons ban, Gingrich put them off, explaining that he needed to build more momentum to create the impression of power...
...carefully choosing his fields of battle, Gingrich gained enormous leverage over the Senate and the White House. And when necessary, he could still use the freshmen in a good cop--bad cop routine. Early this fall, when Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich were haggling about the budget over the phone, the President told one of his aides that the Speaker wasn't the problem in reaching a deal. "It's not Newt," the President said. "It's all those freshmen he's got to worry about...
ALONG THE WAY, GINGRICH was learning some handy lessons. One was the value of setting the bar high, in the belief that it's sometimes easier to do the impossible than the merely improbable. This was especially true about his insistence on balancing the budget in seven years, when conventional wisdom held that no politician had the stomach to balance...