Just as report cards keep parents posted on their children’s progress in school, constituents have a tool to let them know how their federal representatives measure up to their oaths to uphold the Constitution.

We should expect high “grades” from them, because it is not difficult to determine whether legislation oversteps the clearly delineated, limited powers of the Constitution. If there is uncertainty, the Bill of Rights tells the government everything else is off limits. Moreover, an oath calls God as witness to the oath-taker’s honesty and integrity. In other words, it is both illegal and immoral to violate the Constitution. Why are so many Representatives bringing home Fs on their report cards? They may mean well, but a Congressman’s good intentions do not fulfill his obligation before God to vote according to the law. (To see a PDF of The New American's latest "Freedom Index," which shows how every member of the House and Senate voted on key issues, click here.)

So the burden is, as it should be, on “We the People,” and we have no one to blame but ourselves if we continue to send failing Representatives to Washington. We must use the Constitution as a litmus test. This will be especially important in 2012 since Obama seems to have a callous disregard for the Constitution and his oath to uphold it. As a Senator in the 110th Congress, his cumulative score in the "Freedom Index" was 11 percent. But what alternatives will we have?

There are a growing number of candidates for Congress who are running in support of the Constitution. Many of them were motivated to become involved as a result of the political phenomenon in the last presidential race that became known as the “Ron Paul Revolution.” But if the GOP establishment has its way, the Republicans who will go to Washington will be of the neocon variety and will offer voters looking for alternatives to the liberal Democrats more of an echo than a choice. The establishment-favored Newt Gingrich is a case in point.

The Republican Answer?
After more than a decade out of the spotlight, Newt Gingrich is once again making headlines as a conservative author and basking in media speculation of his possibility as a presidential candidate. He is busy promoting his conservatively themed books and documentaries while touting firm belief in limited government and personal freedoms. Gingrich’s rhetoric brings back memories of his old days as a staunch proponent of cutting taxes, balancing the budget, reducing bureaucratic regulations, and strengthening national defense.

Just as in those days, Newt Gingrich now positions himself as a conservative. But does his definition of conservative mean loyalty to the Constitution, or loyalty to the establishment? “Understanding the real Newt Gingrich … is essential,” said John F. McManus, president of the John Birch Society and producer of the new DVD The Real Newt Gingrich. “Americans must realize that they are being persuaded to follow false leaders, to put confidence in men who don’t deserve our confidence.” Both Gingrich’s congressional track record and his present activities prove him no better than the current White House occupant.

Gingrich Resumé
Newt Gingrich served in Congress from 1979 until 1999. His first Freedom Index score (when it was known as the “Conservative Index”) was 84, but it nose-dived from there. He achieved his lowest scores as Speaker of the House. Gingrich consistently lost points for his propensity to support unconstitutional legislation.

1. Education — Gingrich backed federal education funding from his earliest days in office, though the Constitution gives absolutely no authority over education to any branch of the federal government. He helped garner support to create President Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education in 1979. Since then educational spending has soared while educational standards have plummeted. Things got worse when he was Speaker. In 1996, then-Republican Party Chairman Haley Barbour bragged that “education spending went up under the Republican Congress as much as it went up under the Democratic Congress.” That is a bit of an understatement since Gingrich’s Republican Congress increased education funding by $3.5 billion in 1996, the largest single increase in history.

2. Foreign Aid — Gingrich voted numerous times throughout his 20 years in Congress to increase and expand unconstitutional foreign aid and trade. He supported both subsidized trade with the Soviets and federally funded loans to foreign governments through the Export-Import Bank. Between 1994 and 1995, Gingrich voted for $44.8 billion in foreign aid. He also helped push through federally funded loan guarantees to China. Today, that murderous communist regime is the largest holder of U.S. debt in the world.

3. NAFTA and GATT — In 1993, Gingrich proved himself invaluable to Clinton and the Democrats in Congress when he garnered enough Republican support to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the precursor for development of an eventual North American Union, following the same trajectory that has occurred in Europe with the emergence of the EU. (See the October 15, 2007 “North American Union” issue of The New American, especially “NAFTA: It’s Not Just About Trade” by Gary Benoit.) The next year he followed suit by supporting the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO). As Minority Whip, he could have postponed the lame-duck vote on GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) that subjected Americans to the WTO. Gingrich’s Benedict Arnold act helped to hand over the power to regulate foreign commerce, a power reserved in the Constitution to Congress alone, to an internationally controlled body, making America’s economic interests entirely at the mercy of the WTO.

Gingrich knew GATT sounded the death knell for American sovereignty. In testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee prior to the lame-duck session, he said, “We need to be honest about the fact that we are transferring from the United States at a practical level significant authority to a new organization.... This is not just another trade agreement. This is adopting something which twice, once in the 1940s and once in the 1950s, the U.S. Congress rejected.... It is a very big transfer of power.”

4. Contract With America — Another con-game Gingrich played was the much-acclaimed “Contract With America,” the Republican Party’s supposed answer to big government. It turned out to be a public relations smokescreen to cover various unconstitutional measures that Congress planned to pass under Gingrich’s leadership. The Contract included a “balanced budget amendment,” which amounted to a Republican excuse to continue spending while claiming to fight for fiscal conservatism. If the government only spent money on constitutional programs, the deficit would take care of itself.

Other areas of the Contract With America dealt with measures to reduce welfare programs and relieve tax burdens on families and businesses. That sounds good until one considers that the Constitution prohibits welfare programs and taxes that the Contract proposed only to reduce. If Gingrich had been loyal to his oath of office, he would have worked not to trim but to purge them. Ironically, but hardly surprisingly, federal spending in all the areas addressed by the 1994 Contract rose in subsequent years. Edward H. Crane, president of the Cato Institute, observed that “the combined budgets of the 95 major programs that the Contract With America promised to eliminate have increased by 13%.” Crane also pointed out, “Over the past three years the Republican-controlled Congress has approved discretionary spending that exceeded Bill Clinton’s requests by more than $30 billion.”

Another of the problems with the Contract was that it called for stronger federal crime-fighting measures, despite the Constitution’s prohibition on federal involvement in police matters outside of piracy and treason. Countries that do not have such strict constitutional safeguards on federal police end up with Gestapos, KGBs, and Departments of Homeland Security.

5. School Prayer Amendment — The proposed balanced budget amendment was not Gingrich’s only attempt to change the Constitution. He also pushed hard for a school prayer amendment to allow America’s children to pray in schools. It was just another shameless publicity stunt, for Gingrich knows the main obstacle to prayer in schools is not a faulty Constitution but an overambitious Supreme Court. Had he truly wanted to release the federal stranglehold on prayer in schools, Gingrich could have employed Congress’ constitutionally authorized power to restrict the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction of the issue.

6. Clinton’s GOP (Grand Old Pal) — In 1995, Time magazine named Newt Gingrich “Man of the Year,” characterizing him as a states’ rights conservative and the Republican answer to Bill Clinton. The ironic thing about Time magazine’s 1995 claim is that in June of that year, Gingrich and Clinton both agreed at a debate in Clare-mont, New Hampshire, that they were “not far apart” in their views. Later Clinton publicly thanked Gingrich for his support of the President’s pet projects in areas such as welfare, education, labor, the environment, and foreign affairs. He made special mention of Gingrich’s support of the $30 billion Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 that shackled gun owners with new restrictions, federalized a number of crimes, and handed the feds police powers that the Constitution reserves to the states.

On numerous occasions, Gingrich showed himself a friend to Clinton’s military policies, with a flagrant disregard for the constitutional mandate that Congress alone may declare war. He made a formal appeal to the House of Representatives in 1995 to “increase the power of President Clinton” by repealing the War Powers Act. He praised Clinton’s unconstitutional use of the U.S. military to inflict a communist regime on Haiti in 1994, the same year he voted for an extra $1.2 billion for United Nations “peacekeeping” missions. He also urged the President to expand U.S. military presence in Bosnia the following year.

This partial resumé does not include Gingrich’s support of abortion and anti-family measures, federal welfare, a presidential line item veto, the National Endowment for the Arts, confiscation of private property, amnesty for illegal immigrants, higher taxes, and a myriad of other unconstitutional legislation. But it is enough to prove he lied each time took his oath of office. The question is, why this disdain for the rule of law? A close look at Gingrich’s associations provides the answer to why he had such a propensity for claiming conservatism while voting with the establishment.

Futurist
In 1994, Gingrich described himself as “a conservative futurist.” He said that those who were trying to define him should look no further than The Third Wave, a 1980 book written by Alvin Toffler. The book describes our society as entering a post-industrial phase in which abortion, homosexuality, promiscuity, and divorce are perfectly normal, even virtuous. Toffler penned a letter to America’s “founding parents,” in which he said: “The system of government you fashioned, including the very principles on which you based it, is increasingly obsolete, and hence increasingly, if inadvertently, oppressive and dangerous to our welfare. It must be radically changed and a new system of government invented — a democracy for the 21st century.” He went on to describe our constitutional system as one that “served us so well for so long, and that now must, in its turn, die and be replaced.”