Lew just posted Newt’s interview with Beck wherein Newt describes himself as a “Theodore Roosevelt Republican.” OK, let’s go straight to the legend himself, TR:
[I]n the days of Abraham Lincoln [the Republican party] was founded as the radical progressive party of the Nation. . . .
The course I followed, of regarding the executive as subject only to the people, and, under the Constitution, bound to serve the people affirmatively in cases where the Constitution does not explicitly forbid him to render service, was substantially the course followed by both Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. . . .
I bound myself more than ever to treat the Constitution, after the manner of Abraham Lincoln, as a document which put human rights above property rights when the two conflicted.. . . . I believed in invoking the National power with absolute freedom for every National need.
[Theodore Roosevelt: an Autobiography (New York: Macmillan Company, 1913) pp. 381–382, 394–395, 420 (emphasis added)]
Yeah, I’d say TR fan Gingrich is a progressive liberal.
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