Kevin Phillips

Phillips is the editor of “The American Political Report,” and the author of <i>Arrogant Capital</i>.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Q: How has this GOP Congress differed from traditional Republicans?

A: Everything about it suggested it would be a more radical, frustration-based Congress.

First, the party system was coming somewhat unglued and the public wanted something to happen. Gingrich sensed that if the Republicans didn’t go in a radical, quasi-revolutionary direction, they were likely to be pulled apart by these radicalizing forces. They thought they had to do something pretty spectacular to avoid further cynicism about the system. What they did was spectacular in a miscalculated way. It aggravated cynicism.

Second, the Republicans were elected in a reaction against Clinton. If you start doing screwy stuff, within a year and a half, you’ve rescued the guy you thought was buried in shit.

Third, in the last 45 years, Republicans have held power through the presidency: Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush. The occasional Republican Congress — for example, the Senate under Reagan — was still subordinate to executive-branch Republicanism. This is the first time since 1947-48 that we’ve had a Republican Congress without a Republican executive branch. And that means the dogs are out of the cage. ThatÕs what happened back in ’47-’48, too. That was the Congress Truman ran against so successfully. It tried to pass a business agenda, cut taxes for the upper brackets, and put a whammy on educational and health possibilities.

Fourth, it may be too much to call Newt a megalomaniac, but he’s clearly a hypomaniac. There’s no way he was ever going to pursue the humdrum model of past House speakers like Sam Rayburn or Carl Albert. He couldn’t stay out of the spotlight, and he had something ridiculous to say half the time he got on camera.

Q: What corporate interests have been pushing the Gingrich revolt?

A: The Gingrich crowd represents midsized business and emerging buccaneering business, as opposed to long-established, smooth multinationals. An awful lot of the business types who got their tickets punched with this Congress are the people with little niche insurance companies that cherry-pick the health market, or people who pump out penny stocks and don’t want to have to make any statement as to their worth, or people who have pollution problems — little to midsized businesses with a particular problem that Congress could take care of. The Gingrich revolution was not about the white-shoe crowd at an old-line brokerage firm.

Q: What’s an issue that’s come up that illustrates the difference?

A: They grossly overplayed their hand on tort liability and deregulation and all the tax cuts they thought they could get. The typical view of a big-business lobbyist is, “We got lucky, we got a Republican Congress, but let’s not pretend we’ve got a mandate for this stuff. Let’s just figure out what we can take advantage of.”

But these new Republican semi-power brokers handed out a lot of money for these trade associations nobody had ever heard of before. They thought they were big wheeler-dealers, and they were holding meetings with each other and talking about how they were going to force corporations to hire two-thirds Republicans or they wouldn’t do business with them. They overplayed their hand big time. They had never had any significant power in Washington before. They were just grabbing.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate