Portrait of the Arsonist As Young Congressman
Historian Julian Zelizer (Burning Down the House) on the inflammatory influence of Newt Gingrich
March 9, 2021
Does history create vulnerabilities that any number of populist politicians could seize upon? Or do exceptional populists create those opportunities only he or she can exploit?
There’s no simple answer to that question. But it does frame the informative discussion we have surrounding a major populist figure, Newt Gingrich, on our first Season Two episode with Princeton historian Julian Zelizer. Zelizer’s most recent book is Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party.
A 2020 New York Times Notable selection, Burning Down the House focuses on Gingrich’s unprecedented 1989 takedown of then-Speaker of the House, Jim Wright, on relatively minor corruption charges which never resulted in a criminal case. In our Purple Principle interview, Dr. Zelizer points to this as a major turning point on our unfortunate path toward greater polarization. Not only was Gingrich successful in forcing Wright’s resignation; but the Republican Party then rewarded him with a leadership post, thus first embracing the incendiary tactics so common today.
This first episode of Season Two integrates Dr. Zelizer’s observations with important archival moments of that period, such as Gingrich’s early altercations with two successive Speakers of the House, Tip O’Neill and Jim Wright. We also hear great contrast in tone from Speaker Wright’s emotional resignation speech after three decades in the House versus Gingrich’s own upbeat, media-directed resignation announcement ten years later, also in response to corruption charges.
Please tune in for Season 2, Episode 1, “Portrait of the Arsonist as Young Congressman: historian Julian Zelizer on the inflammatory influence of Newt Gingrich.”
Original Music by Ryan Adair Rooney.
Music by The Talking Heads licensed by Rhino Entertainment Company (A division of Warner Music Group) & Warner Chappell Music (Index Music Inc.; WC Music Corp).
Source Notes
Newt Gingrich: Rise to Power" (July 30, 1999) C-SPAN
Associated Press (January 27, 2012) Coach honed debating skills of young Newt Gingrich.
John J. Pitney, Jr. (11/22/11). “Five myths about Newt Gingrich.” The Washington Post.
Charles Coles Diggs, Jr. U.S. House of Representatives.
History. Congressional Black Caucus
Gail Sheehy (Sep. 1995) The Inner Quest of Newt Gingrich. Vanity Fair.
Newt Gingrich. U.S. House of Representatives.
Party Divisions of the House of Representatives, 1789 to Present
Thomas P. O'Neill. Encyclopedia Britannica.
Ron Elving (4/12/18) Ryan's Speakership Makes 7 In A Row Ending In Frustration — Or Worse. NPR
House Speaker Jim Wright - Resignation Address (5/31/89).
Steven V. Roberts (12/8/86). “For new Speaker, new role is seen.” The New York Times.
A 1978 Speech By Gingrich. The Long March Of Newt Gingrich: PBS.
Howard Fineman (4/3/89), “For the Son of CSPAN, Exposure = Power.” Newsweek.
Transcript
Robert Pease (host)
That’s a young Congressman named Newt Gingrich back in 1987 objecting so strongly you might even say he’s attacking Speaker of the House Jim Wright on a procedural issue. This is the Purple Principle, and I’m Robert Pease.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
I’m Emily Crocetti. And Newt Gingrich is not the guest of our show today, but he is the subject of our discussion with the noted author and historian, Julian Zelizer. His New York Times notable biography, Burning Down the House, documents Gingrich’s takedown of Speaker of the House Jim Wright in 1989. This ushers in a new era of hyperpartisanship in Congress, if not the whole country.
Robert Pease (host)
We begin on the topic of Gingrich’s amorality through his decades in the limelight. Zelizer cites one former colleague put it this way: Newt doesn’t take the low road. He takes the tunnel.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
Which is a pretty low blow in itself. So we asked Dr. Zelizer if his research had uncovered many similar observations.
Julian Zelizer
There really were some I heard, just interviewing various members of Congress, including Republicans who worked with him and said this about him in not subtle terms. And this was an ongoing theme, and it wasn't just Democrats who have these memories. It was his own staffers. It was like-minded Republicans, even people who respected him very much didn't particularly like this person. And they also understood the dangers of what he does. So it's one of the most consistent things I think I found other than his own strategy over the years.
Robert Pease (host)
So it's interesting that physically, Gingrich doesn't look like a tough guy. I mean, he's got kind of a baby face and he's a little flabby, if I may say that, and got kind of a high-pitched voice and you wouldn't look at him and say, you know, don't mess with that dude. So where does that toughness come from?
Julian Zelizer
That's a very interesting point. He doesn't have the appearance of a bodybuilder or something who is going to intimidate through his physicality. He's not like Lyndon Johnson, who was the president of the sixties and had the capacity to lean over people and intimidate them by invading their physical space. Part of it is his intellect. He is very bright, he's very sharp, and rhetorically, he has the skills of a pretty tough debater as early as high school. And I think he develops that through reading, through his interaction with his stepdad who constantly would quiz the family on what's going on in politics. And I think rhetorically, and this will be important to him in Washington, that's where he gains the skills to be a bully. It's not his physicality. It's what he can say about you and what he can say to you that really defines his approach to intimidation.
Robert Pease (host)
So it seems like in college and perhaps in his twenties, Gingrich is more of a moderate Republican, I think at one point it supports Nelson Rockefeller who is considered a VP pick by both parties. Hard to imagine that today. So was it just political expediency that caused his rightward turn as he begins to run for Congress? Or was there an actual change in philosophy?
Julian Zelizer
Well, it's both. He was, as you say, a moderate Republican in high school and college. And when he gets a PhD in history at Tulane, he very much liked Nelson Rockefeller, who was part of the moderate wing of the Republican party, when there was a moderate wing. And then in ‘68 and ‘72, he was a Nixon fan and he liked Nixon because he thought, this was a Republican trying to build a broad coalition, something like FDR did in the 1930s. And he only takes his shift to the hard right around 1975, when he's preparing to run for the House of Representatives for the second time. He lost the first time and he is starting to figure out when he runs again, what does he need to do? And he started to network with people who are active in the conservative movement of the 1970s that was growing and taking form.
Robert Pease (host)
So Gingrich eventually gets elected. He arrives in Washington and the very first thing he does – I think you put it in the book – his first official act as a Congressman is to take on a civil rights leader against the advice of some of his party elders. So tell us about that episode.
Julian Zelizer
Yeah, that's a pretty amazing decision for a young Republican Congressman. He goes after Congressman Charlie Diggs of Detroit. Diggs, just as a context, was one of the most important African-American legislators. He had been very involved with the civil rights movement in the 1960s. He had helped create the Congressional Black Caucus in 1971, but he did find himself in ethical trouble by 1979 and 1980. A lot of Republicans told Gingrich this isn't the best idea for your first target. This is an African American who's very respected and you're going to fulfill the idea that the new Southern Republicans are basically backlash politicians playing on the politics of race, but he doesn't care. He moves forward with it.
Robert Pease (host)
In the interest of thoroughness, we should say that Diggs was later convicted and did serve time.
Julian Zelizer
No, absolutely. And he was guilty and it turned out after this was all over, that he had engaged in some bad behavior. That said, the question really was what to do while an investigation was going on, how to do it. And you know, the idea that a young Republican would be the one leading the charge.
Robert Pease (host)
So another event or action that kind of foreshadows things, he forms this caucus, the Conservative Opportunity Society, or COS, and you borrow a phrase from a journalist, Gail Sheehy about Gingrich that he wants to become the Che Guevera of conservatism. So tell us about the COS and their interest in these kinds of revolutionary tactics.
Julian Zelizer
This becomes the base through which Gingrich really rises to power. So he came into Washington in 1979, the year he started going after Diggs. And he's very much angry, not only with Democrats who had controlled the House of Representatives since 1955, but he also doesn't like senior Republicans. And he believes that senior Republicans had basically gotten used to being a minority party. They weren't ready to do what was necessary to retake control of the House and Senate, they believed in compromise and civility, and Gingrich thought that just meant lacking power. So he decides to organize, almost like a guerrilla fighter, which is a term he actually often uses and talks about. And the Conservative Opportunity Society was a small group of like-minded conservative Republicans. And as a group, there were about 12 or 13 of them when they started. They would be pretty ruthless in not only getting attention for what they were doing, but in starting to undercut the power of the Democratic party.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
That’s Princeton University historian Julian Zelizer, discussing Burning Down the House – the biography, not the song – about the former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich.
Robert Pease (host)
And Emily, we should say that as we’ve done interviews on how the United States has become so polarized, the role Gingrich has played comes up over and over again.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
That’s right, and sometimes unexpectedly. Like early in Season One, with Dr. Abigail Marsh, the neuropsychologist. We spoke about the importance of contact between people of different political backgrounds. And she brought up a rule change that Gingrich made as Speaker of the House.
Abigail Marsh (previously recorded audio)
One of the reasons for the current political divide relates to changes that Newt Gingrich made to the way Congress works decades ago. He changed the length of the congressional workweek so that it is much shorter. So the Congresspeople could go back to their home districts over the weekends, but then their families didn't move to D.C. They didn't socialize together in D.C. anymore. So they used to have these friendships across political differences but then stopped having those friendships.
Robert Pease (host)
Also in Season One, the historian Geoff Kabaservice, he noted the history-making role Gingrich had flipping the House to Republicans in 1994 and ascending to the Speaker’s chair.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
Kabaservice documented the decline of moderate Republicans in his own New York Times notable book, Rule and Ruin. He feels that Gingrich put the final nail in their coffin as a political force.
Geoffrey Kabaservice (previously recorded audio)
Well, moderate Republicanism took a nasty hit in 1964 when Barry Goldwater, the very conservative Arizona Senator, became the GOP presidential nominee. The problem was that the conservative faction gained strength with every passing year. Richard Nixon really took the party in a much more populist direction after 1970. And life became more difficult for them after Ronald Reagan became elected in 1980. But really this problem became worse with Newt Gingrich in the 1994 election. And moderates have really been marginalized in the party at this point.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
Dr. Kabaservice told us that if Gingrich hadn’t filled that role, somebody else would have. But Dr. Zelizer paints Gingrich as a really major, and kind of unique force, behind polarization these past few decades.
Robert Pease (host)
That’s right, in Zelizer’s view, that’s because of the main event of Burning Down the House: Gingrich’s role in upending the Democratic Speaker, Jim Wright, on fairly minor charges. We asked him why he chose to document this episode rather than the impeachment of Bill Clinton.
Julian Zelizer
Well, one thing I was really interested in is when does Gingrich's style of partisanship enter into what the party leaders were doing? I think that's important. When do you have someone like a Joe McCarthy, an outlier or a bomb thrower or a maverick, all of a sudden become part of the leadership? And that happens during his takedown of Speaker Jim Wright. During that takedown, he employs his no guardrail type of partisanship very successfully and is able to pressure the Speaker of the House into resigning, which had never happened in American history. And second, during this whole process where he's going after the Speaker for ethics problems, not only does he show all the tools that he's going to use for the rest of his career, but House Republicans elect him to a leadership position, House Minority Whip. And that was a big decision, because the Republicans who until then had kept arms length at Gingrich and said, what he's doing was too dangerous for Washington and would erode our ability to govern, then they decide to bring him in as a leader.
Robert Pease (host)
Well, tell us a little bit more about his tactics and maybe objectives too in going after Speaker Wright.
Julian Zelizer
Well, the Speaker was a great target for him. Gingrich, since that attack on Charlie Diggs, had been focused on the question of ethics and he saw the ethics rules that Congress had adopted after Watergate to try to clean up Washington as a tool that could be weaponized against the Democratic party. And one of his main arguments had been before Wright became Speaker that it wasn't a liberal-conservative debate that was shaping Washington. It was an anti-establishment versus establishment debate. And Democrats were the corrupt establishment. Wright becomes Speaker. He takes over when Tip O'Neill resigns in 1986 and in 87, this old school Texan Jim Wright, who was a legislator's legislator, he wasn't very well loved personally, but he was someone who spent his whole life in the institution. And there wasn't anything really illegal or anything that violated the ethics rules, but Gingrich crafts a narrative when he's speaking to reporters, when he's speaking to other members that this was almost as bad as Watergate, that we were talking about high level corruption, as opposed to the way all legislators acted at the time. And he's very good at both telling that story, smearing the character of the speaker to the point that the ethics committee decides to investigate this matter and getting this out into the media, he knows how the politics of smear works in the modern media, and the more accusations you get out quickly, the harder they are to retract.
Robert Pease (host)
So I think our listeners today live in such a partisan time, so maybe it's not surprising to look back and see that Gingrich was able to convince his fellow Republicans to go against Wright. But how is it the Democrats turned against their own speaker?
Julian Zelizer
I would say with the Republicans, it wasn't inevitable. And from today's perspective, it seems kind of inevitable because what Gingrich did, and the world he created, is now the status quo. That's the point of the book. But when he came to Washington and straight through 1989, when Wright finally resigned, there were a lot of Republicans who didn't agree with what he was doing. The Democrats are more interesting. Why do they basically – listen Speaker Jim Wright, who resigns in May of 1989, didn't have to resign. The ethics committee had not found him guilty of a single thing so far. And there was no evidence that he broke a law, but he resigns. And he resigns in part because he's just scared. This is going to destroy his life personally, the costs of lawyers and the character smear. He resigns because many Democrats are also telling him privately, we don't want to stand by you because the political costs are too high. And it becomes a point of contention right through this day. I spoke with a group of Democrats who were there at the time about my book. And there was a group of them, quite prominent, who said it was the biggest mistake that the Democrats made, that they basically conceded to this kind of partisanship. Not only should they have defended the Speaker and said, there's no reason he needs to resign, but they should have been more aggressive in pointing out that Gingrich was under ethics investigations. At the time he was being accused of similar things that he was accusing the Speaker and others of doing. But in the end, they backed down. Their political fears were much stronger than their will to keep fighting him. And they were also a different kind of party. Democrats in the eighties were still operating, many of them, by older rules. They thought that Gingrich would go away. Jim Wright himself at the time believed that the system would heal itself, even says this in his speech where he steps down, but the Democrats were wrong. They didn't understand Gingrich was the voice of the new Republican party rather than an outlier.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
That’s a bit of the angry young congressman Newt Gingrich having it out with Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill just a few years before he’d mastermind Wright’s resignation from the House.
Robert Pease (host)
That guerilla mentality was there right from the beginning with the baby-faced history professor from Georgia. He didn’t come to Washington to legislate. He came to agitate.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
I asked Julian Zelizer, for the benefit of people my age who’ve only known this kind of division, what were things like before Gingrich brought guerrilla warfare to our nation’s capital?
Julian Zelizer
The way I try to describe it when I'm speaking with groups or speaking with students is that the world before the 1980s, it always had partisanship, Washington's always a fierce place. And politicians naturally think about how to get reelected and how to keep their party or get their party in power. But elected officials basically balance three concerns. One is partisanship, a second is governance, a need and a belief that ultimately government has to govern. And third, the health of democratic institutions. There was a loyalty before the 1980s in both parties to making sure that the institutions of government, including Congress, work. Once Gingrich helped to flip that switch, lots of things became possible. You're willing to say whatever you want about an opponent, which was not the case before the 1970s. You're willing to take basic processes of government, whether it's the filibuster or the budget and use them as partisan bludgeons. And I think that's how to think about the change that happens after the seventies. It's not that the earlier system was perfect. It really wasn't. But this change in terms of what partisanship means and how it's practiced is very dramatic.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
So then if Gingrich widened political polarization and partisanship in the country, do you think if there had not been a Gingrich, would we be less polarized now?
Julian Zelizer
Yeah. The counterfactuals are always very difficult, then historians tend to shy away from them. And I am one of them, but it's a question I obviously think about. And what you're saying is the setup of my book, meaning we talk about how did politics end up this way? And we tend to talk about abstract forces that inevitably pushed us here. Voters sorted, meaning southerners became Republican; liberal Republicans disappeared from the map, etc; or districting; or the siloed media in which we live. All of those are true, but I also really have come to believe over the course of my career that key individuals can make a huge difference. And I do believe that Gingrich's success, the tactics he introduced and his ability to make those tactics, the guiding tactics of the Republican party, both in the story I'm telling and then ultimately as Speaker of the House, that really did matter. And I don't know what would have happened if there was no Gingrich, but the Republicans were not Newt Gingrich yet before Gingrich came to town.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
And going off of that, you've been studying and writing about modern American history and many well-received books, not just Burning Down the House, but also your history of modern American politics, Fault Lines. And what do you think is the most important lesson that young people of the next generation should have in mind as voters, citizens, and potentially mediators in this polarized environment that we face today?
Julian Zelizer
I'd say one lesson or two I would highlight is what we're talking about, that the problems and the dysfunctions and the toxicity that we see around us, that a young American, a student of mine or someone else sees in the news all the time isn't a product of just a few months or a few years, that there are deeply rooted changes that have taken place. And if we don't deal with those from the broad macro dynamics like campaign finance, we're not going to change the way Washington works. And the second is that bipartisanship has its flaws as well. Civility has its flaws, but the kind of partisanship that we have right now renders Washington really incapable of dealing with the questions of the day. And they have to understand this isn't simply about Washington being ugly or politicians speaking poorly about each other. It's about rendering the institutions of government incapable of handling issues like climate change or gun control or a pandemic. And that's a dangerous place to be.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
So then what can an ordinary young person do to make our government more effective?
Julian Zelizer
I do believe that the way Washington works only changes when there is immense grassroots pressure to do that, pressure and sustained pressure over periods of time. And I think there's lots of organizations doing good work, issue-based work, and some doing work that involves procedures. There’s a lot of activists now who are working on the question of gerrymandering, for example. But we saw with the Parkland students, we saw it with Black Lives Matter. I think for any young person, besides voting, step two is to get involved, to find an organization that matters to them. And not only to kind of click the text to give money, but to go to an event when events are happening or a virtual event and to learn, how can I become part of a mass that ultimately changes the way that Washington works?
Robert Pease (host)
Zelizer’s Burning Down the House actually begins with a chapter on how the 2016 Trump campaign decided not to select Gingrich as the VP running mate because of their strong personal and tactical similarities.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
Also their ability to manipulate the media to their own advantage is remarkably similar.
Robert Pease (host)
In Trump’s time it would obviously be Twitter. But way back when Gingrich arrived in the House it was the brand new network C-SPAN, resulting in this memorable exchange between Gingrich and then Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
As Zelizer points out, Gringrich laid out his media philosophy early on in his political career: “conflict equals exposure equals power.”
Robert Pease (host)
With that in mind, let’s hear from Dr. Zelizer about Gingrich’s use of C-SPAN as a newcomer to the House and later his orchestration of the Washington Press Corps in bringing down Speaker Wright.
Julian Zelizer
The story both of you were referring to takes place in 1984, and the Conservative Opportunity Society, they realized this network – no one really watched C-SPAN – was a powerful tool. And what they did every evening, at the end of the day, when most legislators went to fundraisers or they went to meet with their staff, or they went home, Gingrich and his cohort would get on the floor of the House and they'd make these speeches where they leveled really brutal attacks against the Democrats, saying the party didn't care about the security of the country. They were letting communism run amok and essentially they weren't a patriotic group or party. And the thing was, the cameras only covered the person speaking, so you couldn't see the whole chamber. That was the rule that the House had agreed to. So they leveled these attacks and they would even call out certain people by name. And there was no response because a viewer couldn't see that the chamber was empty. It eventually blows up in a big fight on the floor of the House. And it's covered by all the networks. This was the moment when Gingrich became a national figure for the first time. And he also used investigative journalism. He weaponized that as well. There were post-Watergate reporters who were very committed to uncovering corruption and following the lines between politics and money. So the media was Gingrich's platform, especially before he was Speaker, this was the place he could always make himself heard. And I think that's a lesson Republicans have not forgotten. And in fact, now they have a robust conservative media system through which they can use those tactics.
Robert Pease (host)
So I believe you mentioned that Gingrich did not agree to an interview for the book, but made his archive accessible. Is that an unusual arrangement? And if you had been able to interview him, what would you have most liked to ask him?
Julian Zelizer
Yeah, that's a good question. I met Gingrich before I wrote this book, or even thought of it. But then after I started writing it, I tried many times even using contacts who know him well to get an interview, and each time it would be canceled or postponed at the very end, to finally the point I realized it wasn't going to happen. But I was able to use his archives. I don't think he's been very restrictive. He has archives in West Georgia College, which is where he was a professor before entering Congress. And they were phenomenal. So in the end, for me as a historian, I wish I could have talked to him, but most of what I really wanted was the primary, the memos and the notes that he kept and the letters between himself and the media and other members of Congress. But I would have liked to have known from him just how deliberate he was in pursuing this kind of partisanship in the moment of my story. How much of this just happened? How much of this was one moment after another building to this culminating battle or how much he strategically thought through how to put all this together?
Robert Pease (host)
So can you tell us about some of the eureka moments you had in that archive? And it sounds like there were quite a few of them.
Julian Zelizer
There were lots. I mean, one which builds on something we've discussed is just to see how consistent he was in developing this argument after Watergate of the Democrats as the source of corruption rather than Republicans. Most members don't write it all down and he did. The most eureka moment for me, just as a storyteller, was that my book ends before just kind of briefly talking about the modern period with the speech that Jim Wright gives on May 31st, 1989. It's one of the most remarkable speeches, I'd say in modern congressional history, where Wright is resigning. He goes through all the charges that have been made against him. And he says, all of them are untrue. And he argues that he has bad judgment sometimes like everyone, but there's no reason he should resign. And then Wright said, but I will resign, because he argued that if he did not, he knew that the House of Representatives would be consumed by a mindless cannibalism. And he asks both parties in this speech to lay down their arms. He's telling the Republicans to stop doing the stuff that Gingrich is doing. And he's telling the Democrats, basically, don't respond in kind. And I'm looking through the archives, and in between two manila folders, there's a crumpled piece of yellow notebook paper. And by chance I was putting the box away, but I just kind of pulled it out. It wasn't filed, it wasn't labeled. And I saw very quickly, these were the notes that Newt Gingrich was taking as he watched Speaker Wright give this resignation speech. And the notes range from Gingrich being really mad with what Speaker Wright is saying, because Wright is blaming partisanship, and he's blaming the Republicans when really, you know, he should be blaming himself, because he did believe he was unethical. And then the final little note, which at first I could barely read, and then I finally figured it out, was him saying, this is the exact quote, “must be doing good at my job for them to come after me like this.”
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
That was historian and columnist Julian Zelizer on the subject of his book Burning Down the House, Newt Gingrich.
Robert Pease (host)
But several years before Gingrich himself became Speaker in 1994, he was the major force in bringing down the Democratic Speaker of the House Jim Wright on corruption charges that never resulted in a criminal case.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
And in that resignation speech, Jim Wright called for a return to civility.
Emily Crocetti (reporter)
But that call is still unanswered as the chamber remains very much a house divided to this day.
Robert Pease (host)
Ironically though, years after Speaker Wright resigns, Gingrich himself would also step down from the Speaker’s Chair and the House, in response to corruption charges. His announcement, though, had quite a different tone.
Robert Pease (host)
But for possibly the first and only time, let’s not give Newt Gingrich the last word here. Let’s give our featured guest today, Julian Zelizer, the last word, reading a summation of Gingrich’s enduring influence.
Julian Zelizer
When Tea Party Republicans stormed into town after the 2010 midterms election with the nihilistic view of government, as well as their insistence of doing whatever was necessary to bring down the status quo, and Donald Trump shocked the nation by winning the 2016 election against one of the most experienced public servants in modern political history, all of them had a debt to the anti-establishment conservative populism pioneered by Newt Gingrich that shaped an entire generation of Republicans. The Wright scandal was the beginning of this end and its shadow looms large and grows longer with each passing day.
Robert Pease (host)
Thanks for listening in on Episode One of Season Two of The Purple Principle, with special guest Julian Zelizer, Professor of History and Public Policy at Princeton University and author of the New York Times notable biography of Newt Gingrich, Burning Down the House.
Next time on The Purple Principle, we’ll take a more positive look at political compromise in our Congress and our not so United States. Our guest will be Jillian Youngblood of the non-partisan group, Civic Genius. They’ve had some remarkably civil and productive policy discussions with voters across our political spectrum and with U.S. Congress members of both parties.
Jillian Youngblood
I think at this point there are more than 150 specific policy proposals where the majority of Democrats and Republicans agree, which is absolutely wild. I mean, there are certainly places where they don't agree, but there is some common ground on immigration, things like DACA, things on a path to citizenship, for people who have been in the country for a long time, on a whole slew of government reform things, especially around campaign finance reform and ethics laws.
Robert Pease (host)
We hope you’ll join us for that episode, share us on social media, review us on Apple Music and subscribe to our newsletter, the Purple Principle in Print, via our website, purpleprinciple.com. This has been Robert Pease and Emily Crocetti for the Purple Principle team: Alison Byrne, Producer; Kevin A. Kline, Senior Audio Engineer; Emily Holloway, Research and Outreach; Dom Scarlett, Research Associate. Our resident composer is Ryan Adair Rooney.
