Former Speaker Newt Gingrich to Speak at Heritage on Deficit Reduction

Rob Bluey / August 15, 2011

Newt Gingrich knows a thing or two about how Congress operates. The former lawmaker represented a Georgia district for 20 years and spent four of them leading the U.S. House as speaker. So when Congress approved the Budget Control Act, creating the 12-member Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, Gingrich didn’t hold back his criticism.

“I think this super committee is about as dumb an idea as Washington has come up with in my lifetime,” Gingrich said last week. “I used to run the House of Representatives. I have some general notion of these things. The idea that 523 senators and congressmen are going to sit around for four months while 12 brilliant people, mostly picked for political reasons, are going to sit in some room and brilliantly come up with a trillion dollars, or force us to choose between gutting our military and accepting a tax increase, is irrational.”

In a policy speech Tuesday morning at Heritage, Gingrich will flesh out his criticism of the committee and propose an alternative approach to achieve meaningful deficit reduction. The event begins at 9 a.m. and will be webcast live on Heritage.org. C-SPAN2 is also planning to carry it live.