Former Speaker Newt Gingrich, who led Republicans to their first House majority in four decades in 1994, said Saturday the House Freedom Caucus should recall how his own caucus led conservatives to power within the party.
Gingrich tweeted that he and other conservatives had developed “positive action principles” in 1983 as part of what they called the Conservative Opportunity Society.
“[Those] led 11 years later to the Contract with America and the first GOP House Majority in 40 years.”
“If the Freedom Caucus would study them, they could be dramatically more effective,” Gingrich said, going on to cite and agree with a sentiment from political reporter Mark Halperin’s “Wide World of News” newsletter.
“[T]he Freedom Caucus is a bunch of rebels with a series of causes but no coherent path to achieving said causes,” Halperin wrote.
In the 1980s, although Ronald Reagan was in the White House, Boston Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill wielded strong control of the House. O’Neill and Reagan had a notably friendly but ideologically disparate relationship.
Coinciding with the early days of C-SPAN televising live floor proceedings, Gingrich would often take to the well of the House in the late-night hours and address conservatives’ issues to a mostly empty chamber but with a captive audience on the new TV format.
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Gingrich biographer Craig Shirley told Fox News Digital on Saturday that the Freedom Caucus should study the work of their comparative predecessor, the Conservative Opportunity Society, as well as the path Gingrich led from a low-profile congressman to speaker.
“I guess the word brilliant is thrown around so, so cavalierly. So let me just say, it was extremely smart politics to make the case for conservative governance,” Shirley said of Gingrich’s work in the 1980s and 1990s.
“Reagan had already blazed that path eight years before Gingrich did.”
While critics say the GOP has shifted hard to the right on some issues and…
