Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., decried Republicans who are going along with a Democrat-led effort to pass two multi-trillion-dollar spending bills that supporters say are based on a need for infrastructure funding.
As a former House Speaker, Gingrich warned viewers on Sunday’s “Life, Liberty & Levin” that Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is wielding his former gavel in the mold of “dictator” and continues to violate House rules and aggregate majority power more than any other speaker in history.
“The left really wants to destroy the America we know,” he warned.
“I am stunned at how much she has violated the rules and how much she’s aggregated power into one person and the damage that that’s doing to the institution. So the House is a different place than in the Senate, [where] you have this myth of comity.”
Gingrich added that given how Pelosi and her party are behaving, there is no reason for Republicans to trust that “bipartisan” legislation is truly that.
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Many Republicans who believe in that “myth of comity” continue to read left-wing media like the Washington Post and New York Times, Gingrich argued. They believe wholeheartedly in the appearance of bipartisanship.
“What if we could be friends? So [what if] I might have to sell out, but it’ll be so much positive for America to be able to say the word bipartisan,” he said, characterizing those lawmakers’ sentiments.
Gingrich went on to explain that voters must hold their senators accountable when they, as recent overtures appear to suggest, go ahead and pass far-reaching legislation that includes things “no Republican should vote for and that there’s no defense for.”
“I think the members in the Senate who are buying this totally phony bipartisanship in which the Democrats are going to write this bill – it’s going to be a terrible bill,” he said.
“And I think that the Republicans who did vote yes should really rethink that. They’ve got a few days ahead of them and they should really rethink [this]. The people who watch this show ought to call their senators and just say, ‘Have you lost your mind? Have you read the bill? Do you realize how bad it is?’”
He praised Republicans Mike Lee of Utah and Ted Cruz of Texas for rightfully sounding the alarm on how truly partisan and extreme the purported “bipartisan” legislation is.
“Don’t tell me about the headline in the press conference. Look at what the Democratic staff have written into this bill,” Gingrich said.
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“And it will be very abhorrent to most Republicans and I think will become a major issue in primaries in the Republican Party.”
Gingrich predicted intraparty backlash among voters in the GOP if their elected officials help Democrats pass their far-left spending package. He compared it to how voters responded to Congress approving President Jimmy Carter’s transfer of the Panama Canal Zone back to the Panamanians. In 1977, the United States signed a treaty with then-Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos to surrender the canal they’d controlled since the early 1900s.
“[A] whole generation was wiped out in the Senate because they voted [to] give away the Panama Canal. And people just were furious and as American nationalists, they really resented doing it. And so they took it out on Republican senators and Democrats. I think this bill is going to be similar,” he said.