Gingrich: Time for 'national conversation' about immigrants living in country illegally who 'obey the law'
Source: The Hill
01/29/26 4:11 PM ET
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) on Wednesday said the country needs a national conversation about immigrants lacking permanent legal status who obey the law, as public opinion sours on the Trump administrations deportation sweeps.
We need a national conversation about what were going to do, about people whove come here, some of them 20 years ago, whove been obeying the law, paying taxes, good neighbors, have kids, go to PTA. Very few Americans want to see the police walk in and pick them up and deport them, Gingrich said during an appearance on Fox Business Network.
On the other hand, people do not want to give them citizenship. So there should be some middle ground here on long-term goals, he added.
Gingrichs comments coincide with Fox News host Sean Hannity speaking out against workplace raids during immigration enforcement crackdowns nationwide.
Read more: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5713623-gingrich-immigration-reform-conversation/
Gingrich is a big voice behind the scenes manipulating the GOP Congress to bend the knee. Whenever I see something about Gingrich, I add this (from The Atlantic) -
Newt Gingrich turned partisan battles into bloodsport, wrecked Congress, and paved the way for Trumps rise. Now hes reveling in his achievements.
Story by McKay Coppins
November 2018 Issue
Updated on October 17, 2018
[snip]
On June 24, 1978, Gingrich stood to address a gathering of College Republicans at a Holiday Inn near the Atlanta airport. It was a natural audience for him. At 35, he was more youthful-looking than the average congressional candidate, with fashionably robust sideburns and a cool-professor charisma that had made him one of the more popular faculty members at West Georgia College. But Gingrich had not come to deliver an academic lecture to the young activists before himhe had come to foment revolution.
One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we dont encourage you to be nasty, he told the group. We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal, and faithful, and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire but are lousy in politics. For their party to succeed, Gingrich went on, the next generation of Republicans would have to learn to raise hell, to stop being so nice, to realize that politics was, above all, a cutthroat war for powerand to start acting like it.
The speech received little attention at the time. Gingrich was, after all, an obscure, untenured professor whose political experience consisted of two failed congressional bids. But when, a few months later, he was finally elected to the House of Representatives on his third try, he went to Washington a man obsessed with becoming the kind of leader he had described that day in Atlanta. The GOP was then at its lowest point in modern history. Scores of Republican lawmakers had been wiped out in the aftermath of Watergate, and those whod survived seemed, to Gingrich, sadly resigned to a permanent minority mind-set. It was like death, he recalls of the mood in the caucus. They were morally and psychologically shattered.
But Gingrich had a plan. The way he saw it, Republicans would never be able to take back the House as long as they kept compromising with the Democrats out of some high-minded civic desire to keep congressional business humming along. His strategy was to blow up the bipartisan coalitions that were essential to legislating, and then seize on the resulting dysfunction to wage a populist crusade against the institution of Congress itself. His idea, says Norm Ornstein, a political scientist who knew Gingrich at the time, was to build toward a national election where people were so disgusted by Washington and the way it was operating that they would throw the ins out and bring the outs in.
[snip]
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/newt-gingrich-says-youre-welcome/570832/
But in any case on this issue...

Meanwhile, where are former SOHs Cheeto Boner and Eddie Munster?
RandySF
(81,840 posts)C Moon
(13,524 posts)Skittles
(170,033 posts)!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
DJ Synikus Makisimus
(1,238 posts)Immigrants are the fall guys for any sort of malfeasance that politicians choose to whip up their base. Historically, they've been the "cause" of disease (or its spread), the "cause" of organized crime," the reason parts of towns and cities turn into slums, and are "chronically impoverished." All that as if it weren't society's elite keeping folks in that predicament, mostly as a source of cheap labor from which they can squeeze greater profits.
US voters have not historically been especially worldly or smart, and have always been easily led to hate people who are different from themselves in some way or another by "clever" politicians. I haven't noticed that changing recently. So immigrants are the perfect political patsies; immigrants of color even more so in racist AmeriKKKa. Republicans currently have more haters than the other guys, but if those other guys make any move toward a normal discussion about the subject, the right-wing media verse is all over them - so they don't. Democrats, especially moderates, seem to live in constant fear of Fox, OAN and the rest. So short story long, not bloody likely.
On the other hand, if Newt is looking to run for something as a Democrat somewhere, I'm sure the "moderates" at the DNC are all ears - just like they would be for Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger.
BidenRocks
(2,908 posts)He is a big part of our government being fucked up and polarized.
Irish_Dem
(80,316 posts)GFY Newt.
greymattermom
(5,807 posts)Already exists.
Chasstev365
(7,318 posts)* View Democrats as the "enemy"
* Be as hypocritical as you want
* Never compromise, even if it would help your constituents
* Have short, stupid slogans targeted at the ignorant.
So do us all a favor and die from fucking yourself!
2naSalit
(100,654 posts)Even if he sounds like he makes sense, he has a bomb behind his back. No words that fall from his facial sphincter are worth hearing.
Stop wasting good air already! JFC!
sinkingfeeling
(57,435 posts)Javaman
(65,320 posts)perhaps old shit head new, way past his due date, should reflect upon how he left congress, huh?
ColoringFool
(396 posts)Old Crank
(6,741 posts)He lead the charge to this incivility running rampant today.