Republican Leader Tells Dissidents To Keep Quiet Gingrich Appointee Says Comments Sending Wrong Message

GOP lawmakers who are urging House Speaker Newt Gingrich to step down while facing an ethics probe should “keep their mouths shut,” the new chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee said Monday.

Rep. John Linder, R-Ga., who was appointed to the campaign post last week by Gingrich, said Republicans would send the wrong message by pressuring Gingrich to relinquish his post.

“If you’re going to allow a group of Democrats to use the ethics process for political reasons and win just by forcing him aside, that’s just exactly the wrong thing to do,” he said.

Two Republicans, Reps. Steve Largent of Oklahoma and Christopher Shays of Connecticut, suggested last weekend that Gingrich should step aside until the House ethics committee completes its investigation.

Largent, one of Gingrich’s most loyal supporters in the 1994 class of GOP freshmen, said doing so “would reduce the amount of rhetoric that we would hear on the floor for the 105th Congress and allow us to work more constructively.”

Linder, whose new job will be to work for the re-election of a Republican Congress in 1998, said he intends to talk to Largent and Shays this week.

“I think the membership ought to keep their mouths shut and wait and see what the report says,” said Linder. “There’s something unseemly about members who get queasy and get out and attack their own leadership.”

Gingrich spokesman Allan Lipsett said the speaker’s office wants the ethics committee to complete its review of the Gingrich record before Congress opens in early January. “We fully expect Newt to be speaker in the 105th Congress,” he said.