Word: speaker
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...planned. "You can't, in a free society, postpone permanently major arguments," he says, " and the job of leadership is to manage it." That night he erased decades of habit in the House: the habits that members are more loyal to their supporters than to their Speaker, that the real work of Congress amounted to the horse trading of small favors in the committee room, that freshmen in Congress are about as powerful as the doorkeepers, that the House is where bold schemes come...
...need to change the Congress first. His problem was that the House was never intended to be very powerful; the Founding Fathers designed a legislative body that could boil over with parochial passions, only to be cooled by the sober Senate. Senators can filibuster; Presidents can veto. All the Speaker can do is create the appearance of momentum so that the rest of the government will...
...full years methodically recruiting and training his own private army. "He was willing to go in and help these candidates that other people wouldn't touch," says conservative guru Paul Weyrich. "When they came here, who was it that they knew? Gingrich was their leader." Once he became Speaker, they supported all the House restructuring he proposed, not least because it gave them a more central role than any generation of congressional arrivistes in modern history...
...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...
...confronted the Speaker at a meeting of the high command: "Where is it in stone that we have to balance the budget in seven years?" The Speaker replied, "Let's put it to a vote. Who wants to put it in stone?" Everyone in the room raised his hand--except Kasich. Senate Republicans, though queasy at the idea, eventually accepted the goal as well, and the script for the rest of 1995 was written...