Former House Speaker Jim Wright, who represented Fort Worth in Congress for 34 years before resigning during a storm of ethics allegations, has died. He was 92.
Wright was a man of perplexing and sharp contrasts. He was a street fighter/peacemaker, local politician/international leader and a consummate Democrat who offered his hand for bipartisanship.
http://www.dallasnews.com/...
...with his dramatic gesture, becoming the first House speaker in history to resign, Wright hoped to inspire an end to a time when “vilification becomes an accepted form of political debate, when negative campaigning becomes a full-time occupation, when members of both parties become self-appointed vigilantes carrying out personal vendettas against members of the other party,” he said in his resignation speech.
“All of us in both political parties must resolve to bring this period of mindless cannibalism to an end,” he said. “There has been enough of it.”
Members of both parties rose in a thunderous ovation.
Then nothing changed.
http://www.star-telegram.com/...
His issues in '46 look an awful lot like the issues of today - so we can say not much has changed in that regard, either.
Mr. Wright’s springboard into politics was the Young Democrats, which he helped organize to advocate a minimum wage, a world police force, medical care for the elderly and other controversial issues.
With “Red Scare” fears on the rise in postwar Texas, many staunch conservatives viewed the organization as a hotbed for radical thought. In a confrontation at a VFW Hall, a drunk called Mr. Wright a “commie sonofabitch” and Mr. Wright, the former Golden Glover, decked his antagonist with seven quick punches.
In 1946, Mr. Wright won election to the Texas House of Representatives from Parker County and quickly established himself as a liberal Don Quixote with ill-starred efforts to finance new social services by taxing big oil, gas and sulfur producers.
http://www.star-telegram.com/...
More history on the Gingrich/Wright fight
Newt Gingrich had an urgent warning for conservatives: Jim Wright, the Democratic speaker of the House, was out to destroy America.
It was April 1988, a month before Mr. Gingrich, an up-and-coming Republican congressman, shocked colleagues by pressing ethics charges against the powerful Mr. Wright. Now, he was singling out the speaker as a major obstacle in a coming “civil war” with liberals.
“This war has to be fought with a scale and a duration and a savagery that is only true of civil wars,” Mr. Gingrich said, in a speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation. He branded Mr. Wright as part of “the hard left,” whose members, he warned, “will try by chameleon-like actions to destroy our country.”
The brutal civil war Mr. Gingrich predicted did indeed come to pass, during a nearly decadelong conflict in which ethics charges were the primary weapon. Mr. Gingrich lodged a complaint against Mr. Wright, which cost the Democratic speaker his job. Democrats, in turn, bombarded Mr. Gingrich with accusations of ethical impropriety, which led to a $300,000 fine and a reprimand for bringing discredit to the House.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
This spring [1989], in an extraordinary jolt to the usually somnolent politics of House Republicans, Gingrich leapt from his niche as a back-bench bomb thrower to the post of minority whip, a key position in a party leadership. His ascension changes the chemistry of politics on Capitol Hill and signals a dramatic new Republican strategy. After thirty-four years as the minority party in Congress, years of deep frustration, the Republicans seem ready to launch an all-out war on Democratic dominance, attacking the Democratic Party as a whole with the same spectacularly successful (if ungentle) tactics that George Bush's campaign managers used against Michael Dukakis in 1988.
On Tuesday, The New York Times gave prominent display on its op-ed page to an article written by one of Gingrich's most bitter Democratic foes, Representative Bill Alexander of Arkansas, who branded Gingrich a neo-McCarthyite and urged his colleagues to take up the fight against him. Then Gingrich and his wife, Marianne, met with reporters to answer charges (filed by Alexander) of possible improprieties in an unusual book-promotion deal --improprieties loosely similar to those with which Gingrich has charged Speaker Wright.
Gingrich had taken on Democrats almost from the moment he hit town, but in May 1988 he went after the big fish: the Speaker of the House. After spending months preparing his case against Wright, he filed charges of ethics violations with the House Committee on Standards of Official conduct.
Democrats considered it the height of hypocrisy for Gingrich to go after Wright for his peculiar book deal when Gingrich himself had made not one but two unusual book arrangements. The first was in 1977, before he actually won his seat, when he accepted $13,000 from his supporters to write a book that he never completed. The second case, involving Gingrich's 1984 manifesto for the Conservative Opportunity Society, concerned a unique arrangement by which twenty-one "investors" paid $5,000 each to a limited partnership, run by Mrs. Gingrich, to raise money to promote the book.
http://www.pbs.org/...