Members of Congress now spend between 30%-70% of their time raising money to get re-elected to Congress or to get their party back into power. And not just the Republicans: The Democrats quickly followed the lessons of Professor Gingrich. And in the almost 20 years since he came to power, practically everything about that great institution has changed.
Gone is any semblance of deliberation, or the idea that there is a business of the nation to be done, as opposed to the business of the party in power. Instead, the institution that Gingrich inherited ? the one in which Democrats worked with Republicans to pass the most important tax reform in modern history (Reagan's), and in which Republicans led Democrats to break a filibuster in the Senate and pass the most important social legislation in a century (The Civil Rights Act of 1964) ? was gone. What replaced it is the completely dysfunctional institution which practically no American has confidence in today.
More important to the right, as the business of Congress became the business of fundraising, the ideals that had brought Gingrich to power quickly got compromised. Fundraising demands pushed the Republican leadership to give up on its stated goal of shrinking the size of government, so that it could better use the power of majority status to raise campaign cash. As the Washington Post's Robert Kaiser reported in his 2009 book, "So Damn Much Money
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this guy started out in ga as a crook and taker
he moved on to bigger things but has never changed
very intelligent and puts his full effort into lining his pockets any way he can
what a great American
wish I could be like him
