Abstract
At the end of the 104th Congress’s first 100 days, Speaker Newt Gingrich (R.GA) was regarded by the national media and the Washington political community as a combination of Czar Reed, the president of the United States and Lenin: a powerful legislative leader, America’s premier political figure and agenda-setter, and the leader of a successful revolutionary movement. His face appeared on the covers of the major newsweeklies; Time asked: ‘Is this the most influential Republican in America?’ and called him the ‘Wizard of Congress’; Newsweek claimed that Gingrich had ‘in just three months altered the basic course run by government for the past 60 years’.2 When the House completed action on the Contract, Gingrich asked for and was granted national television time to talk to the American people, an event unprecedented for a legislative leader.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
In addition to the sources cited, this essay is based on interviews conducted by the author. Unattributed quotations are from those interviews.
Time, 7 November 1994, 10 April 1995; Newsweek, 10 April 1995.
For a full presentation of the argument, see Barbara Sinclair, Legislators, Leaders and Lawmaking (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
Barbara Sinclair, Majority Leadership in the U.S. House (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983) and Steven S. Smith, Call to Order: Floor Politics in the House and Senate (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1989).
David W. Rohde, Parties and Leaders in the Postreform House (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
Richard B. Cheney, ‘An Unruly House’, Public Opinion, 11 (1989), pp. 41–4; and William Connelly and John Pitney, Congress’ Permanent Minority?: Republicans in the U.S. House (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994).
See below, and Connelly and Pitney, Congress’ Permanent Majority?
Healey, ‘Jubilant GOP Strives to Keep Legislative Feet on Ground’, Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, 12 November 1994, pp. 3210–15.
Daniel Stid, ‘Transformational Leadership in Congress?’. Paper prepared for delivery at the 1996 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, 29 August-1 September, 1996, p. 1; and Dan Balz and Ronald Brownstein, Storming the Gates: Protest Politics and the Republican Revival (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), p. 144. See also Ronald Peters, The Republican Speakership’. Paper prepared for delivery at the 1996 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, 29 August-1 September 1996.
David S. Cloud, ‘Speaker Wants His Platform to Rival the Presidency’, Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, 4 February 1995, p. 333.
For a fuller explication, see Sinclair, Legislators, Leaders, and Lawmaking, chapter 2. Also see Gary Cox and Mathew McCubbins, Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
Thus conceived, principal-agent theory does not conflict fundamentally with Randall Strahan’s theory of leadership, the most sophisticated of the theories positing, to varying extents, leader autonomy. See ‘Leadership in Institutional and Political Time: The case of Newt Gingrich and the 104th Congress’. Paper prepared for delivery at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, 29 August – 1 September 1996. Strahan argues that there are critical moments in institutional time ‘in which changes in the political environment … create demands and opportunities for actions by Congress that cannot be realised within existing institutional forms’ (p. 19) and that these periods allow creative leaders to ‘influence the emergence of new institutional forms’ (p. 20). My emphasis and my interpretation of some important aspects of this case are, however, different.
John J. Pitney, ‘The Conservative Opportunity Society’, manuscript, December 1988.
Balz and Brownstein, Storming the Gates, pp. 144–6.
Douglas L. Koopman, Hostile Takeover: The House Republican Party1980–1995 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), p. 53.
Elizabeth Drew, Showdown: The Struggle between the Gingrich Congress and the Clinton White House (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 42.
Douglas Koopman, ‘The House of Representatives Under Republican Leadership: Changes by the New Majority’. Paper prepared for delivery at the 1995 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, 30 August-3 September 1995, p. 15.
Drew, Showdown, p. 261.
Koopman, Hostile Takeover, pp. 142–7; and Stid, ‘Transformational Leadership’, pp. 6–8.
Quoted in Stid, ‘Transformational Leadership’, p. 7.
Lawrence Evans and Walter J. Oleszek, Congress under Fire: Reform Politics and the Republican Majority (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), pp. 132–3.
Newt Gingrich, ‘Leadership Task Forces: The “Third Wave” Way to Consider Legislation’, Roll Call, 16 November 1995, p. 5.
Connelly and Pitney, Congress’ Permanent Minority, p. 42.
Koopman, Hostile Takeover, pp. 141–2.
Stid, ‘Transformational Leadership’, p. 11.
Marcia Gelbart, ‘Gingrich Redefines Role as Speaker,’ The Hill, 28 February 1996, p. 1.
See Sinclair, Legislators, Leaders and Lawmaking, pp. 236–40.
Jonathan D. Salant, ‘Alliance of Private Groups Pushes GOP “Contract”’, Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, 28 January 1995, pp. 261–2; and Balz and Brownstein, Storming the Gates, pp. 198–9.
Republicans do seem to have given affected interest groups a considerable greater role in drafting legislation than the Democrats ever did. See Drew, Showdown, pp. 116–17.
Calculated from data in Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, 8 April 1995, p. 1006.
Connelly and Pitney, Congress’ Permanent Majority?, pp. 19–40.
Janet Hook, ‘Budget Battle Forces Gingrich into the Trenches’, Los Angeles Times, 21 October 1995, p. A20.
Stid, ‘Transformational Leadership’, p. 12.
Charles O. Jones, The Presidency in a Separated System (Washington, D. C: The Brookings Institution, 1994).
Drew, Showdown, pp. 305–75.
Paul Light, The President’s Agenda (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1982).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1998 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sinclair, B. (1998). Leading the Revolution: Innovation and Continuity in Congressional Party Leadership1. In: McSweeney, D., Owens, J.E. (eds) The Republican Takeover of Congress. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26570-1_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26570-1_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-26572-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-26570-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political & Intern. Studies CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)