Pelosi Risks Ethics Charges to Bring Down Newt Gingrich

COMMENTARY | It looks like that the air of bipartisanship that hung over the infamous couch ad with former Speakers Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi has dissipated to be replaced by threats, counter-threats, and accusations.

Pelosi fired the first shot by threatening to reveal some dirt on Gingrich that she learned while sitting on the House Ethics Committee, according to The Hill. She would reveal this privileged information "when the time is right" presumably in October, 2012, if Gingrich were nominated.

Gingrich fired back, suggesting that Pelosi would be in violation of House rules were she to go through with this move. He urged that Pelosi be investigated for threatening to violate her duty to keep deliberations of the ethics committee secret.

The Pelosi threat seems to represent a return to the Democratic strategy to try to bring down Gingrich with ethics charges, most of them bogus. The campaign that was waged during Gingrich's speakership, as related by the Washington Post, was successful in weakening Gingrich to an extent and helped to lead to his resignation in 1998 after a disappointing midterm election for Republicans.

Democrats are said to be gleeful at the prospect of running against Gingrich. He is too extreme, too unpleasant to win against President Obama, it is said.

Just as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were, others might say.

But the spectacle of Pelosi expressing willingness to expose herself to an ethics investigation and possible sanctions in order to bring to light dirt on Gingrich suggests that the Democrats are afraid of him. Gingrich did end a 40-year rule of Congress by Democrats in 1994, taking away their power, and enacting elements of the Contract with America. The fury of the Democrats over this is unending and without limit.

The nightmare of people like Pelosi is a President Gingrich with a Republican House and Senate, enacting legislation that makes the Contract seem tame by comparison. Considering that the promise of Obama was that he would do the same thing in reverse, it shows that we're in a turning world indeed.

Therefore, Gingrich must be destroyed - again - aS thoroughly as the Romans destroyed Carthage. The 2012 campaign is bound to be nasty. With Gingrich as the nominee, it will bring new definitions of that term.

Source: Pelosi: I'll reveal information on Gingrich 'when the time is right', Alicia M. Cohn, The Hill, Dec. 5, 2011

The Gingrich Ethics Probe, The Washington Post