Contract With America Quotes

The 1994 elections that brought Newt Gingrich to power in the House decisively shaped the remaining years of Bill Clinton's presidency, pushing him further to the right and bringing out his latent tendency to govern every day as if an election were being held the next.

Partisanship particularly increased after the 1994 elections and then the appearance of the first unified Republican government since the 1950s.

I think people will be so happy with the Contract with America that term limits won’t matter.

I said after 2006 that Republicans didn't just lose our majority, we lost our way. I mean, our party walked away from the principles that men in our national governing majority first in 1980 and again in 1994, and the American people walked away from us.

One of the things that was missing from the 2014 election was a Contract With America type of platform.

Unlike the Contract with America, which was created by Washington pollsters and insiders, Families First was developed from the grassroots up. Congressional Democrats from across the country spent months meeting with people back home, asking them what issues were important to them, and what Congress could do to make their lives a little easier.

Newt Gingrich had to work hard - getting Republican candidates to sign the Contract with America - to nationalize the election that swept Republicans to victory in 1994. A Democratic anti-Tea Party campaign would do that for the Republicans - nationalize the election, gratis - in 2010.

There's no doubt that when the Republican Party took over in 1994, the 'Contract with America' was an opportunity to implement some things - like welfare reform and some of the other initiatives. Then, it kind of lost its steam.

Reagan was president and had Democrats control the House and Senate, and they reformed the tax code. Clinton was president, and he had Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole; they reformed welfare and balanced the budget.

Joe Scarborough was one of 74 Republicans elected to the Congress in 1994 in response to the missteps of the early Clinton era. He was the first Republican elected to Congress from his northern Florida district since the 1870s and handily won re-election three times.

One of the big mistakes Republicans made with the Contract with America is that they tried to do too much too fast, and people revolted against it.

Newt has two transitions behind him. First he had to capture control of the House. He had to get the Republican budget through. He had to get the Contract With America through. He has done that.