This is Later with Lee Matthews. The Lee Matthews Podcast More of what You Hear Weekday Afternoon is on the Drive. Best selling offer and former Speaker the House Nuth Gingish is joining us now to not only talk about his podcast Newts World, which can be heard everywhere you get podcasts, but also the iHeartRadio app and his new book, How Big Government Socialism Is Crippling America Defeating Big Government Socialism. Speaker, former Speaker of the House, King Rich, Welcome.
I'm glad to be with you, and I'm glad they were changed to chat with you. Yes, we chatted earlier about a lot of these types of topics, and we need only look no further than the recent battle over the debt ceiling. That's right. Well, I actually have a brand new book coming out called Marshal the Majority, which talks about that kind of a fight because when we won in nineteen ninety four, we were faced with how do you change the government, and we had to negotiate with President Bill Clinton
and it was a one step at a time process. We ultimately got the only four years of a balanced budget in your lifetime, but we did it one step at a time, and I think if you measure the recent negotiations, if it's the first step, this was a pretty good deal, and Speaker McCarthy deserves a lot of credit if it's the last bad deal. And my support for it was based on my own experience to the Speaker of the House that this was, in fact the first step towards a remarkable period,
and I think that that's going to turn out to be true. The next thing they're going to do, I believe, is the House Republicans will produce a proposal to get to a balanced budget, and then they will continue the investigation process. In this fall, you're going to have twelve appropriations bills, and every one of them, I think is going to cut spending below what the death ceiling called for. I mean, it's an argument that seems to
be as old as the party itself. Democrats love to give or make people think they're getting free stuff, and it's it's not ceased in my lifetime, and I don't think even in your lifetime. How can we get Democrats to just stop spending money they don't have. Well, I think he replaced them with Republicans who vote no. I mean, that was that was part of the lesson marched the Majority is that you had to go out and make the
case. Something we had learned from Ronald Reagan, who was extraordinarily good at convincing people and who in some ways you could argue as the most successful president in modern times, and that he set out to do three really big things that he got all three of them done. He defeated the Soviet Empire, he renewed the American economy, and he rebuild our belief in our cult, in our civic culture as patriotic Americans. And those were his three goals,
and he was remarkably good at it. And I think that we when we did the contract with America in nineteen ninety four, we were literally standing on Reagan's shoulders there. Every single item in the contract was something Reagan would have supported. And it's it's well, it's worth remembering. And this is why
I talked about one step at a time and marched the majority. We point out that Reagan in nineteen sixty five, when he first campaigned for governor, was for welfare reform, and Reagan ended up ultimately we passed it in nineteen ninety six, thirty one years later. Now that you know and then that reform, by the way, was the most successful application of work in American history. Millions of people left dependency, got jobs, rose in income,
and took more children out of poverty than any other legislation ever passed. And it was pure Reaganism. March to the Majority is the newest book from New Gingrich and he is joining us now on the drive. Another thing I'm seeing in the Democrat Party, mister speaker, is there's this notion or this movement to destroy election day across the country. We're seeing more and more states opt to either expand how many days you can vote, to how many means by
which you can vote, and destroy election day. I think the Democrats believe that the more confusing they can make it, the longer it can be what they want. Republicans focus on campaigns, Democrats actually focus on the election. So what Democrats want is the longest possible time to track you down and make sure you voted if you are. And that's part of why they do that. You know, the French have an election on one day, and everybody in France goes to vote on one day. They vote with paper ballots,
they're counted that day, and there's no significant amount of theft. I think the Democrats believe if you had a totally honest election, they would lose, and so they have a deep passion, whether it's in Chicago or California or you name it, to find ways to have longer elections. And I get the idea that the Founding and this is where the history professor and you is
probably going to come out. I get the idea the Founding Fathers when they composed our system of government, if you did not wish to participate in the process, they didn't want you to. They actually thought citizenship was a responsibility.
And if you had said, we're going to find some way to get ignorant people who don't know anything at all to show up and vote, and by the way, well you know, we will make sure that they vote the right way by giving them whiskey or whatever, they would have thought there was not a birth. But the Founding Fathers also understood that politics is inherently
dangerous to a free society because it leads to factions. I mean, Washington talks about this very clearly and was very worried that you'd end up with people who maneuvered, not for the country's interests, but for their own interest and of course that partly just the human nature. March to the Majority is the new book by a new Gangbridge where he talks about what happened in nineteen ninety four and a lot of that can be applied today. Mister speaker, Well,
I actually wrote March the Majority is a cookbook for today's generation. I think people will find that it relates very directly to their lives today, and that you can go through the book and take out lessons that can be applied by the Republicans, whether it's in Congress or the state legislature, or you name it. And I think for citizens it's also a very useful kind of
cookbook to measure how can we be effective? You know, we did get to four consecutive balanced budgets the only time your lifetime, and we did get to the largest conservative reform, the welfare reform, in ways that we're actually pretty remarkable, and we got a Democratic president to sign them. So it is doable. It can be done, and marsh the Majority shows you how to do it. What have we been doing since then? Have we just been renewing the same old budget each and every year? Or have just been
going by the same template each and every year. In the last sense of very determined, solid leadership, the natural pattern of the system is to spend more, tax more, build bigger bureaucracies. I mean this whole idea, for example, of the three and a half billion dollars for an FBI headquarters that will be bigger than the Pentagon is a perfect example of deureaucracy. It's
like dinosaurs. They grow as big as they can get, and I think one of the challenges to citizens is to put them on a diet and shrink them. And I think that what you had is in the absence of a Reagan quality of leadership, and we were standing on Reagan's shoulders, so we had a huge advantage. In the absence of that kind of leadership, the
system just gradually migrates in the wrong direction. I think Trump probably did as much as any one person to do to shake up the system, but as you saw, that aroused levels of criminal behavior against him by the bureaucracy that
I look at. I'm astonished at the kind of law breaking, for example, that senior FBI agents engaged in, or that the intelligence services gaged in, or the level of dishonesty that the news media got involved in because they were all just you know, they were they were rapid about this guy who was breaking up their games. Well, along those lines, mister speaker, knew Gingrich is with us. You remember the Nixon administration. I can't help
thinking Nixon would have loved to have had an FBI like that. Well, I think you know that was one of the great dangers. It's an enormous danger through to it and the FBI targeting individuals. I mean, once you bring the power of the government to bear, no individual citizen can stand up to it. March to the Majority is the new book from Newt Gingrich. You can also hear his podcast, newts World, on the iHeartRadio app and
everywhere you get podcasts. Mister speaker, I'm delighted to speak to you again and look forward to reading the book. Look forward to coming back again. Thanks for listening to Later with Lee Matthews the Lee Matthews podcast, and remember to listen to The Drive Live weekday afternoons from five to seven and Ihearts Media Presentation