Newt Gingrich Criticizes Fellow Republicans Taking House 'Hostage'

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has slammed Republican members of Congress who are opposed to electing Representative Kevin McCarthy as the next speaker.

Gingrich, a Republican, told Fox News' Sean Hannity on Tuesday that the 20 GOP members who voted against McCarthy were taking "the conference hostage" and appeared to compare them to "terrorists."

His comments come after McCarthy failed to win a majority in three rounds of voting for the speaker as the new Congress met for the first time on Tuesday. In the third vote, McCarthy won 202 votes, Republican Representative Jim Jordan received 20, and Democrat Hakeem Jeffries garnered 212.

Jordan has said he does not want to be speaker and supported McCarthy in a speech delivered from the House floor.

Gingrich told Hannity that the 20 Republicans who voted for Jordan were "not voting against McCarthy, they're voting against the House Republican Conference."

Gingrich pointed to the fact that McCarthy had won a leadership vote among members of the House Republican Conference. He also questioned a new rule that would allow five members of the conference to bring forward a motion to vacate the chair, essentially a vote of no confidence in the speaker.

"Lincoln and his first inaugural warned that the problem of secession is once you establish that principle, then everybody can secede from everybody," said Gingrich, who is also a historian.

"These five people need to take a deep breath tonight and ask themselves do they want to send the signal that every five people in the conference can screw up everything for whatever reason," he said.

Gingrich added that he knew "from personal conversation that last night three of them went in and presented Kevin McCarthy with 30-some different demands, most of them involving personal advancement.

"They weren't talking about ideology. They weren't talking about principles. They were talking about who gets which committee, who gets to be chairman. Things that are a clearly an effort to blackmail all of the rest of the conference," the former speaker said.

"And I think the rest of the conference understands this is a core decision. Do the 202 win, or do the 20 win?" Gingrich asked. "And, in a free society, just as you can't give into terrorists and you can't give into hostage-takers, you can't allow them to take the conference hostage and win.

"I hope that in a conference tomorrow morning when people have a good night's sleep, have a chance to talk, I hope they can find some key policy, not patronage, a key policy position to bring back enough of the members to get this over with on the first ballot tomorrow," he said.

However, Gingrich added that he was "not shaken" by the failure to elect a speaker on Tuesday, pointing to the nine ballots it took in 1923 and "133 ballots to pick a Speaker in 1855. So this is not unprecedented."

Newsweek has asked the House Republican Conference for comment.