Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) knows a thing or two about the position, so when he was asked late last week about how the thin Republican majority should proceed in selecting someone to replace ousted former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), he readily offered up some advice.
In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, Gingrich said the GOP Caucus should lock themselves in a room and not come out until a Speaker is chosen.
“Right now, they can’t govern,” he told “Fox News Sunday” anchor Shannon Bream. “And I think that the eight people who betrayed the conference and joined the Democrats to defeat 96 percent of the conference, unleashed fury that I don’t think they’d even dreamed of because they gave every person the right to be equally destructive and equally angry. And now it’s a mess.
“Just a couple of observations,” he continued. “First, they should have stayed in. When they get back here, they should stay in, they should go into a conference, not come out, bring food in and stay there, and a very simple test, can you get 217 votes? They shouldn’t bring anybody out until they have 217.
“And second, that 217 has to be committed not just to electing a Speaker but to stick together for the next five or six months. They’ve got big decisions coming down the road. There’s a very real danger that they’ll elect somebody, and three or four or five weeks from now, you’re going to have a group of people blow up and decide to go back into the same mess,” Gingrich added. “So they need to pick somebody to get stability.”
“I frankly wish that they — and Chris and I have talked about this. I wish they had a woman candidate, of all the candidates they’ve got running, you know, so somebody like Elise Stefanik, or Beth Van Duyne, who had been a mayor of a city before becoming a congressman, I think, in some ways, given the level of rowdiness, and the level of juvenile behavior, it’s conceivable that a female speaker will be more effective, and actually getting them all to get together and stick together,” he said.
“That’s the key. They have to learn to stick together,” the former Speaker noted. “I would do a very simple test. Get them all in the same room. As I said earlier, bring food in, have an occasional bathroom break. And as — if it lasts long enough…you know, how about an hour off to go shower, but otherwise stay together?
“And keep meeting and keep talking. And I’d work backwards. I would do a whip check and say who could possibly get to something. I don’t care who they are, they don’t have to be candidates right now, it could be the least, the most surprising person,” he said.
