This is Later with Lee Matthews. The Lee Matthews Podcast More of what You
Hear Weekday Afternoon is on the Drive. Best selling offer and former Speaker the
House Nuth Gingish is joining us now to not only talk about his podcast Newts
World, which can be heard everywhere you get podcasts, but also the iHeartRadio
app and his new book, How Big Government Socialism Is Crippling America Defeating Big
Government Socialism. Speaker, former Speaker of the House, King Rich, Welcome.
I'm glad to be with you, and I'm glad they were changed to
chat with you. Yes, we chatted earlier about a lot of these types
of topics, and we need only look no further than the recent battle over
the debt ceiling. That's right. Well, I actually have a brand new
book coming out called Marshal the Majority, which talks about that kind of a
fight because when we won in nineteen ninety four, we were faced with how
do you change the government, and we had to negotiate with President Bill Clinton
and it was a one step at a time process. We ultimately got the
only four years of a balanced budget in your lifetime, but we did it
one step at a time, and I think if you measure the recent negotiations,
if it's the first step, this was a pretty good deal, and
Speaker McCarthy deserves a lot of credit if it's the last bad deal. And
my support for it was based on my own experience to the Speaker of the
House that this was, in fact the first step towards a remarkable period,
and I think that that's going to turn out to be true. The next
thing they're going to do, I believe, is the House Republicans will produce
a proposal to get to a balanced budget, and then they will continue the
investigation process. In this fall, you're going to have twelve appropriations bills,
and every one of them, I think is going to cut spending below what
the death ceiling called for. I mean, it's an argument that seems to
be as old as the party itself. Democrats love to give or make people
think they're getting free stuff, and it's it's not ceased in my lifetime,
and I don't think even in your lifetime. How can we get Democrats to
just stop spending money they don't have. Well, I think he replaced them
with Republicans who vote no. I mean, that was that was part of
the lesson marched the Majority is that you had to go out and make the
case. Something we had learned from Ronald Reagan, who was extraordinarily good at
convincing people and who in some ways you could argue as the most successful president
in modern times, and that he set out to do three really big things
that he got all three of them done. He defeated the Soviet Empire,
he renewed the American economy, and he rebuild our belief in our cult,
in our civic culture as patriotic Americans. And those were his three goals,
and he was remarkably good at it. And I think that we when we
did the contract with America in nineteen ninety four, we were literally standing on
Reagan's shoulders there. Every single item in the contract was something Reagan would have
supported. And it's it's well, it's worth remembering. And this is why
I talked about one step at a time and marched the majority. We point
out that Reagan in nineteen sixty five, when he first campaigned for governor,
was for welfare reform, and Reagan ended up ultimately we passed it in nineteen
ninety six, thirty one years later. Now that you know and then that
reform, by the way, was the most successful application of work in American
history. Millions of people left dependency, got jobs, rose in income,
and took more children out of poverty than any other legislation ever passed. And
it was pure Reaganism. March to the Majority is the newest book from New
Gingrich and he is joining us now on the drive. Another thing I'm seeing
in the Democrat Party, mister speaker, is there's this notion or this movement
to destroy election day across the country. We're seeing more and more states opt
to either expand how many days you can vote, to how many means by
which you can vote, and destroy election day. I think the Democrats believe
that the more confusing they can make it, the longer it can be what
they want. Republicans focus on campaigns, Democrats actually focus on the election.
So what Democrats want is the longest possible time to track you down and make
sure you voted if you are. And that's part of why they do that.
You know, the French have an election on one day, and everybody
in France goes to vote on one day. They vote with paper ballots,
they're counted that day, and there's no significant amount of theft. I think
the Democrats believe if you had a totally honest election, they would lose,
and so they have a deep passion, whether it's in Chicago or California or
you name it, to find ways to have longer elections. And I get
the idea that the Founding and this is where the history professor and you is
probably going to come out. I get the idea the Founding Fathers when they
composed our system of government, if you did not wish to participate in the
process, they didn't want you to. They actually thought citizenship was a responsibility.
And if you had said, we're going to find some way to get
ignorant people who don't know anything at all to show up and vote, and
by the way, well you know, we will make sure that they vote
the right way by giving them whiskey or whatever, they would have thought there
was not a birth. But the Founding Fathers also understood that politics is inherently
dangerous to a free society because it leads to factions. I mean, Washington
talks about this very clearly and was very worried that you'd end up with people
who maneuvered, not for the country's interests, but for their own interest and
of course that partly just the human nature. March to the Majority is the
new book by a new Gangbridge where he talks about what happened in nineteen ninety
four and a lot of that can be applied today. Mister speaker, Well,
I actually wrote March the Majority is a cookbook for today's generation. I
think people will find that it relates very directly to their lives today, and
that you can go through the book and take out lessons that can be applied
by the Republicans, whether it's in Congress or the state legislature, or you
name it. And I think for citizens it's also a very useful kind of
cookbook to measure how can we be effective? You know, we did get
to four consecutive balanced budgets the only time your lifetime, and we did get
to the largest conservative reform, the welfare reform, in ways that we're actually
pretty remarkable, and we got a Democratic president to sign them. So it
is doable. It can be done, and marsh the Majority shows you how
to do it. What have we been doing since then? Have we just
been renewing the same old budget each and every year? Or have just been
going by the same template each and every year. In the last sense of
very determined, solid leadership, the natural pattern of the system is to spend
more, tax more, build bigger bureaucracies. I mean this whole idea,
for example, of the three and a half billion dollars for an FBI headquarters
that will be bigger than the Pentagon is a perfect example of deureaucracy. It's
like dinosaurs. They grow as big as they can get, and I think
one of the challenges to citizens is to put them on a diet and shrink
them. And I think that what you had is in the absence of a
Reagan quality of leadership, and we were standing on Reagan's shoulders, so we
had a huge advantage. In the absence of that kind of leadership, the
system just gradually migrates in the wrong direction. I think Trump probably did as
much as any one person to do to shake up the system, but as
you saw, that aroused levels of criminal behavior against him by the bureaucracy that
I look at. I'm astonished at the kind of law breaking, for example,
that senior FBI agents engaged in, or that the intelligence services gaged in,
or the level of dishonesty that the news media got involved in because they
were all just you know, they were they were rapid about this guy who
was breaking up their games. Well, along those lines, mister speaker,
knew Gingrich is with us. You remember the Nixon administration. I can't help
thinking Nixon would have loved to have had an FBI like that. Well,
I think you know that was one of the great dangers. It's an enormous
danger through to it and the FBI targeting individuals. I mean, once you
bring the power of the government to bear, no individual citizen can stand up
to it. March to the Majority is the new book from Newt Gingrich.
You can also hear his podcast, newts World, on the iHeartRadio app and
everywhere you get podcasts. Mister speaker, I'm delighted to speak to you again
and look forward to reading the book. Look forward to coming back again.
Thanks for listening to Later with Lee Matthews the Lee Matthews podcast, and remember
to listen to The Drive Live weekday afternoons from five to seven and Ihearts Media Presentation