Word: speaker
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...reflex. House Speaker Newt Gingrich uses the term elite as an all-purpose epithet, meaning little more than someone or something he doesn't like. Just since the election he has applied the term to directors of art museums ("self-selected elites using your tax money and my tax money to pay off their friends"), to the Bipartisan Entitlement Reform Commission ("driven by elite values"), to people who send E-mail messages supportive of President Clinton ("urbanites make up the Internet elite," according to a Gingrich spokesman) and, of course, time and again, to the "elite media" or "media elite...
...third of their House majority was supplied by 73 freshmen. The shock troops of the revolution, they were hard to the right and unbeholden to the old order. Almost half of them had never held office of any kind before. Even so, they were presumably obliged to the new Speaker, who had nurtured them for years via his political-action committee, GOPAC, campaigned in most of their districts and given them an unusual number of choice committee positions. With his ``Newtoids'' securely behind him, the thinking went, the biggest problem for Gingrich would be to keep more moderate Republicans from...
...working out that way. While even Bill Clinton is moving so briskly to the middle that his State of the Union speech last week gave Gingrich dozens of moments to stand up and applaud, the new Speaker is running into disputes with his own followers. Just hours before Thursday's final vote on the balanced-budget amendment, Gingrich had to summon a dozen freshmen House members to his office to pull them in line on one of the most important measures of the G.O.P. ``Contract with America.'' The freshmen were refusing to vote for a watered-down version...
...freshmen are also threatening to walk away from a Mexican bailout supported by Republican leaders in both houses; to force the most stringent version of term limits, over the objections of party elders; and to push for a repeal of the assault-weapons ban, a huge fight the Speaker doesn't want just yet. ``Some of these guys just have no fear,'' says an awestruck Republican House veteran. ``Some of them look at us like we're the problem...
Streisand said funding of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting should continue and that House Speaker Newt Gingrich's notion that private donations could provide continued quality arts programming was incorrect...