Richard Shiro/AP - Republican presidential candidate, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich speaks at Tommy's Ham House, Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2011, in Greenville , S.C.
The essence of a real deficit-cutting plan is that “someone’s going to say no,” said Michael Tanner of the libertarian Cato Institute. “And Newt’s created a plan where no one’s going to say no,” he said. “ ‘I’m going to give you more choices, but nobody’s going to be worse off.’ And that’s just fantasy.”
Asked whether this approach would result in an expansion of government bureaucracy, Gingrich has a two-part answer.
“Yeah, but a very minor one,” he said. He cited, as a model, a program in Chile in which a two-track retirement-account system was outsourced to private companies. “It’s essentially a privatized management structure, and you then have a very small federal overview board.”
Gingrich also has offered a detailed outline of his plan to rein in the judicial branch. He says that the nation’s founders wanted this to be the weakest of the three branches.
“Everything that I have asserted has historic precedent,” he said this week, adding: “This is a fight we want.”
One of Gingrich’s ideas is effectively to fire federal judges — even an entire appellate court.
“This court does not meet. It will not be appropriated for. Go home,” he told an audience in Iowa, outlining the plan. As targets, he has listed a liberal-leaning appeals court and a judge in Texas who banned formal prayer at a high school graduation ceremony (a decision that was later overturned). “I would do no more than eliminate Judge [Fred] Biery in San Antonio and the 9th Circuit.”
The problem, legal scholars say, is that the Constitution appears to say that judges can’t be fired: They serve for life, unless impeached. And it also says Congress can’t cut their pay.
Also, Gingrich has laid out plans to bypass the Supreme Court entirely. He said he would instruct the executive branch to ignore recent decisions that granted more rights to detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and he says that Congress can declare certain new laws unreviewable by the Supreme Court.
“You could repass [the Defense of Marriage Act] and make it not appealable to the court, period,” he said in a forum in Iowa. In a legal sense, that might be possible, scholars say. There is a provision in the Constitution that allows Congress to limit the court’s jurisdiction.
But that power has been rarely used, because it could set a precedent — one that Gingrich and other Republicans might regret.
Now, conservatives hope the Supreme Court will give them a victory next year by striking down Obama’s health-care law. But what if Democrats, following Gingrich’s logic, had simply declared thatlaw not appeal-able?
“Be careful what you ask for,” said Roger Pilon, a legal scholar at the Cato Institute. “You may get it.”
Staff writer Amy Gardner contributed to this report.
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