By Dan McDermott
The Lynchburg Times and McDermottReport.com
LYNCHBURG – Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said President Barack Obama is holding military families hostage in his budget battle with House Republicans and said that potential Republican rival Donald Trump’s newest show is ‘being Apprentice Candidate.’
Speaking at The Awakening 2011 conference at Liberty University on the eve of a potential government shutdown Apr. 8, the potential Republican presidential hopeful said that the government “doesn’t have to shut down today if the President is willing to work with the House Republicans one, to not have the military as a hostage, which as an army brat I find very offensive. I mean this idea that he won’t pay for the military for a year and take care of military families while they’re risking their lives for America I find, frankly, pretty darned offensive.”
Gingrich faced his own budget showdown with former President Bill Clinton that led to a government shutdown in 1995. He had some advice for the current president and Speaker John Boehner. “Maybe they’d be better off to break the bill into three or four components and try to solve one of them a week and keep the government rolling one week at a time. That might be the most practical way to do it. I don’t think a shutdown is unavoidable but of course they are running out of time,” he said.
Gingrich said he thinks blame for a shutdown will split along ideological lines but that most Americans think the government is spending too much money. “ Virtually every survey says the American people want a smaller deficit and less spending and they want a smaller government in Washington. I know of no survey that doesn’t generally say the country thinks this scale of deficit is impossible to sustain and so I would say the country will ultimately sort it out,” he said.
Gingrich laughed when asked his thoughts on fellow Republican Donald Trump’s statement that he had a ‘team of investigators’ combing through records in search of President Obama’s birth certificate. “I think that the Donald is such an interesting person in every way that being ‘Apprentice Candidate’ is his newest show. He’s a terrific guy. He adds a lot to the race. I can’t imagine what he’ll announce by tomorrow. He’s very inventive and I think frankly for a Republican party that is sometimes a little bit dull having somebody like Trump hang out is going to guarantee that you all have a lot more to cover. I think he is seriously inventive and I think he will have many things, none of which I intend to comment on,” he said.
Unedited audio:
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Q: Do you think there will be a shutdown? (Local TV reporter)
Former Speaker Newt Gingrich: I have no idea. I don’t think there needs to be a shutdown and I think the House Republican bill that would finance the military through the end of the year actually is a pretty good step. Maybe they’d be better off to break the bill into three or four components and try to solve one of them a week and keep the government rolling one week at a time. That might be the most practical way to do it. I don’t think a shutdown is unavoidable but of course they are running out of time.
Q: Mr. Speaker, we’re hours away from a shutdown. You were here at this very point many years ago. Can you tell us what it was like then and what it might be like negotiating it now. (CNN)
Gingrich: First of all I think there are a lot of people who are tired and really focused on trying to figure out if they can avoid having a shutdown but they also realize there are principals involved and they can’t… I think on the Republican side it would be very, very hard to accept anything less than a significant, very significant cut in spending. My sense was that they were pretty close. I think it’s possible they’ll get to an agreement this afternoon. I think it’s possible they could try to keep the government open on a rolling basis for a few days at a time. When we tried to do that in ’95 it turned out to be impossible to manage after a while. I think that the President has to also recognize that the election of 2010 had some very significant meaning and that is you don’t have 63 seats change hands and not realize that there was a signal sent for a dramatically less expensive government and I think that he’s going to have to come to grips at some point. This is small. You look at the size of Paul Ryan’s budget and the scale of changes with things like block granting medicaid back to the states. That’s a much bigger challenge than this is. Remember, we didn’t get to a big problem until the end of ’95. I mean if they can’t find some way to work their way through this, they have much bigger problems coming down the road in another couple months.
Q: Mr. Speaker, one of the themes of your speech though was that Republicans should stand by their principals and not compromise. Democrats feel the same way. They feel that this is an attempt to take away women’s health from women, that this is an attempt to insert ideological matters into what should be strictly a budgetary battle. (CNN)
Gingrich: I think that’s why it’s very difficult to deal with. Part of the difference is that having lost control of the House, you know it’s very ironic. President Obama came in in 2009 and had a meeting and said to the Republicans, “I won. So get used to it.” Well, at some point he’s got to look at John Boehner and realize John Boehner won and that the country spoke unequivocally. You add in the election, for example, of Sen. Manchin in West Virginia and the Senate has moved dramatically further towards conservatism. You look at the 705 state legislative races that moved and it’s the biggest change in modern American history and there are more Republican state legislators today than at anytime since 1925. You look at what Chris Christie’s doing and what Scott Walker’s doing or what John Kasich’s doing and what Rick Scott’s doing. You know all of these folks are dramatically more fiscally responsible than President Obama and at some point he’s got to look at the underlying pattern of the country and realize we cannot borrow the scale of money he wants to borrow. Now, that’s going to cause questions how much, how much heat does there have to be to begin to realize that he’s going to have to change the direction that he wants to take the government and I can’t give you an answer to that. This could either work its way out in the next few hours or the next few days or this could be the beginning of a very long rocky period. You look at California where they had these fights. It’s not very encouraging. In California they sometimes melt down for months at a time.
Q: Who’s getting the blame if we have a shutdown? (German newspaper)
Gingrich: Look, I think that the American people will probably split ideologically. Virtually every survey says the American people want a smaller deficit and less spending and they want a smaller government in Washington. I know of no survey that doesn’t generally say the country thinks this scale of deficit is impossible to sustain and so I would say the country will ultimately sort it out but I think this is a historic problem but not a political problem. You look at Ireland and you look Portugal, you look at Greece. I mean the scale of deficit we’re talking about is very dangerous historically and figuring out how to get the political system to work to get back on the track towards a balanced budget is a very deep problem. I’m frankly fairly tired of this, you know, ‘Who’s consultants will spin better?’ I couldn’t care less as a citizen. I’d like to know what are we going to do? What’s the President’s plan? You know picking the final four—none of whom made it—and kicking a soccer ball in Brazil is not a substitute for leadership. So what’s his plan? How would he get to a balanced budget? What would he do to dramatically reduce the deficit? How would he get us back to creating jobs? How would he get us to energy in America instead of energy in Brazil? At some point he has to actually be the president.
Q: But if you were president right now, Speaker Gingrich, and one chamber was controlled by the opposing party, the other by Republicans, how would you be handling these negotiations. Right now at this moment. (CNN)
Gingrich: Well first of all I would try to have been involved like a month ago, two months ago. I’d try to work it out long before you get to this mess. Second, I would try to find a compromise to keep the government open and as I said, Boehner and the Republicans in the House have offered a compromise. They’ve offered a $12 billion cut and they’ve offered to fund the military for the rest of the year and I think the President ought to look at that as a very serious opportunity. The government doesn’t have to shut down today if the President is willing to work with the House Republicans one, to not have the military as a hostage, which as an army brat I find very offensive. I mean this idea that he won’t pay for the military for a year and take care of military families while they’re risking their lives for America I find, frankly, pretty darned offensive. And two, you could then break up the budget into components people could agree on and components they can’t. Maybe the problem in part is the Democrats having failed last year to pass any of these bills. Remember, all this is the result of a Democratic house, a Democratic senate and a Democratic president failing to pass these bills. That’s the only reason you have a continuing resolution is they didn’t pass the bills when they were in charge. So maybe you ought to break it apart into component units and pass five [continuing resolutions], each for a different section of government and fight over the ones, and take the least important ones and have your last fight over the least important ones so if you can’t agree it frankly doesn’t matter very much.
Q: Mr. Speaker, one of your potential opponents, Donald Trump, says he has a team of investigators in Hawaii. What do you think of that? (Dan McDermott, The Lynchburg Times/McDermottReport.com)
Gingrich: I think that the Donald is such an interesting person in every way that being ‘Apprentice Candidate’ is his newest show. He’s a terrific guy. He adds a lot to the race. I can’t imagine what he’ll announce by tomorrow. He’s very inventive and I think frankly for a Republican party that is sometimes a little bit dull having somebody like Trump hang out is going to guarantee that you all have a lot more to cover. I think he is seriously inventive and I think he will have many things, none of which I intend to comment on. Thank you all very, very much.
