ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, December 31, 1996 TAG: 9612310088
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
THE THOUGHT of Majority Leader Richard Armey as speaker of the U.S. House isn't exhilirating.
Unlike current Speaker Newt Gingrich, a more complicated man than the ogre his political opponents make him out to be, Armey is a mean-spirited, sock-it-to-the-poor, give-away-the-store blowhard. He'd be less apt than Gingrich to search for common ground with a Democratic administration, more apt to produce two years of constant confrontation.
Nevertheless, House Republicans would serve America well next week by declining to re-elect Gingrich to the speaker's post - even if that meant the ascension of next-in-line Armey.
Gingrich's re-election would imply acceptance of his sleazy flouting of tax laws and misleading statements to the House Ethics Committee. It would feed already-rampant cynicism about Washington's culture of corruption.
Gingrich's defense, that he knew not what he did, isn't credible.
What's more, rechoosing Gingrich as speaker would cast an unnecessary shadow over the credibility of congressional probes into wheeler-dealer fund-raising at the Democratic National Committee - and the possibility that the Clinton White House overstepped even the lax boundaries of campaign-finance law in securing its Asian connection to campaign dollars.
That Gingrich, chief ethics tormentor of former Democratic Speaker Jim Wright, himself has now been found out is ironic - a retelling of an old story about the fate of hubris. While there's resemblance to Wright's sins, no evidence suggests Gingrich used the power of his office to illicitly line his own pockets, as Wright did.
The Republican's sins have less to do with personal venality than with systemic political corruption, in which nothing takes precedence over fundraising - a la in the White House.
Yet Gingrich's transgressions are serious nonetheless. The IRS rule of which he ran afoul isn't some arcane provision of the tax law. It marks a basic distinction between charitable and political organizations. Donations to the former are tax-deductible; contributions to the latter are not.
Nor is this a case of charitable work becoming incidentally involved in political activity. Gingrich's Abraham Lincoln Opportunity Foundation, putatively established to help poor inner-city children, put 95 percent of its $300,000 budget into GOP recruiting activites. Gingrich's "Earning by Learning" program, putatively established to encourage children to read, put 72 percent of its budget into overhead, including to the author of an authorized Gingrich biography.
That's still just Georgia peanuts, of course, compared with the questionable millions that flowed to the DNC for the furtherance of Bill Clinton's political career. The flow richly merits investigation by Congress.
Yet if the GOP keeps Gingrich as speaker, credence will be added to Democrats' defense that any such probe is a double-standard political game. Just as Whitewater merited investigation by other than a Republican partisan as independent counsel and the ethically challenged Al D'Amato as Senate point man, so does Democrats' alleged money-laundering merit investigation by a House unburdened by a tainted speaker.
Debatable as it is, the case for dumping Gingrich becomes a no-brainer if Republicans can muster the wisdom to elect someone other than Armey as his successor. Rep. John Kasich of Ohio, for example.
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