by Newt Gingrich

Someone pointed out to me this clip from my speech at Restoration Weekend is getting a lot of views. Why do you think it resonates? Let me know



Transcript:


NEWT GINGRICH: Now…I have been using that two plus two equals four to start the following conversation on economics, so I’ll just give this because it’s a wonderful tool.


I tell every audience: I’m going to give you half of a sentence…you give me the other half. And it’s exactly like two plus two equals four.


If you can’t afford to buy a house…what’s the second half? How many of you would agree that if you can’t afford to buy a house, don’t buy it? Raise your hand, I’m serious.


Now think about this, for twenty-five years we’ve lived a lie. For twenty-five years the official policy of the United States has been: If you can’t afford to buy a house, we won’t look at your credit rating, we won’t require down payment, we won’t make you pay any capital…any principal for three years, we’ll give you a below market interest rate.


You do that to one person, they go bankrupt, it’s a personal tragedy; you do that to a million people, it’s a national crisis. Yet have you heard any national political leaders say, “You know, the entire economic problem we’ve got right now is a cultural problem.”


We don’t want to reward saving and investing, we don’t want to reward working, we don’t want to encourage being prudent, we don’t want to the truth about your finances, we don’t want to make you be a responsible adult. And you think we could run a country this way?


So now let me apply two plus two equals four to our current problem: There’s more and more evidence coming out that the deeply troubled, non-Rotarian, who killed a number of Americans at Ft. Hood. I am only using politically acceptable language.


(Laughter)


We…we…we realize, many of you will understand that recently when we’ve arrested people in Denver, Detroit, and New York, as well as the troubled person in Ft. Hood, they all shared one common characteristic: They did not belong to Rotary.


And so I’ve begun to develop a brand new profiling system…built around non-Rotarians. Because I wouldn’t want to have any kind of profiling system which was politically insensitive, lacked clarity, or focused in on things like, “it’s turning out this guy is routinely… communicating with a radical cleric in Yemen. “
And the National Security Agency knew it…and the FBI knew it. And they were all standing around, “Well, maybe it’s a research project.”


Now, maybe before 9/11, you could say, “maybe it’s a research project.” This is madness.


And now you have an Attorney General whose basic position is: “Let’s have a public trial under American criminal defense model, with their lawyers having access or demanding access or suggesting access. Frankly, somebody should move…should introduce a resolution of impeachment. This is a…


(Applause)


Let me try to illustrate my point, because I think it’s why the concept of replace rather than reform is so important. I don’t want to be told that appointing an Attorney General whose law firm was pro bono defending terrorist made sense.


I don’t want to be told that when he appoints lawyers whose law firms defended terrorist pro bono, it made sense.


I don’t want to be told that people that care more about the rights of terrorist than the lives of Americans should be allowed to serve in the Justice Department of the United States.


(Applause)


One of the reasons the American people have not yet mobilized to the full power of their sovereign capacity is because they don’t yet have leadership that’s prepared to say, “This is real.” I mean, if you believe this is real and you believe we could lose an entire city…and you believe these people are needlessly endangering the United States, then we need to establish in House and Senate, and we need to establish across the country a standard of behavior which makes it clear that this is not a game. This is not politics, this is not business as usual.


And I’ll give you one closing example:


I believe we need a profound fight about religious liberty. I believe that fight became unavoidable when the Ninth Circuit Court ruled that saying one nation under God as part of the pledge was unconstitutional.


I believe it is a sign of a fascist mentality that the ACLU has filed a law suit about a cross in the middle of the Mohave Desert. I mean the idea that a cross in the middle of the dessert is a threat to the mind set of secular fanatics tells you almost everything you need to know.


And I’m a historian, so my reaction to this is to read history.


In 1802, the Jeffersonians passed the Judiciary Act of 1802. Jefferson knew a fair amount about the constitution, Madison knew vastly more; they were both in the administration.


The judiciary Act of 1802 abolishes eighteen out of thirty-five federal judges…doesn’t impeach them, abolishes them…says, “Were not paying you, you can’t go to…there’s no court.”


Several of them said, “this was inappropriate, it’s was a lifetime appointment.”


They went to the remaining seventeen judges to file a suit and the remaining seventeen judges said, “Have you lost your mind? If I accept the suit they are going to abolish my court.”


(Laughter)


This is…this is, by the way, precisely what Hamilton and Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers, “That anytime the weakest of the three branches takes on the two elected branches, if the two elected branches are serious, they will in fact guarantee the defeat of the Judicial branch. Now…


(Applause)


As many of you know, I am a moderate…so I would only propose not to abolish over half of all the judges, which is what Jefferson did, I would merely propose to abolish the Ninth Circuit and re-recruit….because, if we’re serious, that’s the right reaction.


You show me a judge so ignorant they believe it’s unconstitutional to say, “One nation, under God,” I’ll show you a judge who shouldn’t be drawing money from the tax payers…very Straight-forward relationship.


And remember in closing, the reason I wrote the wonderful book that Gay helped inspire at Mount Vernon, To try Men’s Souls, is because we thought, when we sat down and discussed it a year and a half ago, that we would get to a point when we would have high unemployment, foreign enemies, and a radical administration. And people would want to know, “what is it Americans once did?” and “How is it that we become America?”


And on Christmas Day 1776, Washington’s Army had collapsed from thirty thousand in Brooklyn in September to twenty-five hundred; less than one out of every thousand Americans had the courage to be with Washington on Christmas Day.


Of that twenty-five hundred, one third did not have boots; they wrapped their feet in burlap and they left a trail of blood marching the nine miles to Trenton.
Washington decided to cross an icy river at night…in a snow storm, to march at night to surprise eight hundred professional German soldiers, win a surprise victory, capture all eight hundred, and reestablish the legitimacy of the revolution.


Two weeks later, he had fifteen thousand volunteers. The password that night was: Victory or death!


I want you to go from here after this weekend and look every successful person you know in the eye and look every patriot you know in the eye, and tell them: There are young men and women risking their lives all around this planet, in uniform, in the State Department, in the intelligence community, so we can be free. Don’t tell me how much you’ve given, don’t tell me how tired you are, don’t tell me how frustrating it is.


This country was created by people who were willing to say,”Victory or death,” while marching in burlap bags in the middle of a snow storm. We are going to find those people again; we are going to run those people for five hundred and thirteen thousand offices, in both parties.


We are going to have to isolate and crush the secular, socialist left, and we are going to have to replace their failed system with systems that succeed. This is work George Washington would have approved of and this is work you need to take seriously for the next three years, so we can give our children and grandchildren the greatest, freest, and most prosperous country in history.


Thank you, very, very much.