THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 5, 1997 TAG: 9701030026
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J4 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: 58 lines
Members of Congress are scheduled to decide Tuesday whether to retain Newt Gingrich as speaker of the House for the 105th Congress. Unfortunately, they are being asked to buy a pig in a poke.
Gingrich is embroiled in an investigation by the Ethics Committee. It has questioned some of his fund-raising activities and interpretation of tax laws. Gingrich has admitted to supplying the committee with inaccurate, incomplete and unreliable information and has implied the tax advice he relied on was questionable.
Yet the vote to reappoint Gingrich to the speakership will come before the House members hear from James Cole, the outside counsel to the Ethics Committee, and before the committee decides what actions to take on the Gingrich matter.
That's unfortunate. Those who believe Gingrich should step aside or that an interim speaker should be appointed pending the outcome of the investigation make several telling points.
The speaker is not just the leader of the majority party's forces in the House but in a sense serves all Americans. Yet the men who become speaker, like all House members, are elected only by the half-million constituents in their home district - in Gingrich's case, the 6th of Georgia.
In elevating Gingrich to the speakership, House members are therefore acting as proxies for their own constituents who have no voice in the choice but will have to live with the consequences. At the minimum, members ought to know all the facts concerning alleged and admitted ethics violations before voting to elect a speaker. The present timetable prevents that.
It's reasonable to be concerned about the ethical lapses of a person possessing the kind of power the speaker has - to move legislation, to set a national agenda, to influence tax policy and spending decisions.
And practical political considerations also come into play. If, as many believe, Gingrich's effectiveness as a legislative leader will be substantially undermined as a result of the ethics probe, that too becomes an issue for the party and the nation.
The 105th Congress is confronted with significant issues, including the crafting of a path to a balanced budget, reform of entitlement programs and rethinking of defense needs for a post-Cold War world. The speaker of the House will be in the thick of those and other contentious issues. If Gingrich can't command loyalty from his friends, attention from his foes and respect from the people, he may not be the man for the job.
Analogies with the situation of the president, confronted with his own gaggle of ethical investigations, are flawed. Clinton was just re-elected by a plurality of the voters themselves, despite widely available information about his troubles. An investigation by an independent counsel, not his colleagues and cronies, is ongoing and will presumably reach an eventual conclusion. Furthermore, removing a president is a constitutional crisis. Electing a speaker is a workaday decision. There are 434 other candidates to choose from.
Ideally, this week's vote should be postponed until the ethics matter is resolved, and that resolution should be arrived at with dispatch. Failing that, an interim appointment should be considered. Members would be wise to recall the adage: Choose in haste, repent at leisure.