Commenting on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s prediction that over 30 Democrats might retire from the House before the 2022 election, which could contribute to a massive victory for Republicans, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich said, “You could easily be above 30 retirements before this is over.”
Speaking on Fox & Friends, Gingrich stated, “First of all, the House under Nancy Pelosi is not a very happy place, with all the COVID restrictions, all the voting by absentee, all the different things they are doing, the masking, the police requirements. Members actually get checked walking on the floor. I walked on the floor recently, I was astonished that to get on the floor of the House, you go through sort of a TSA system with a policeman watching you, as though you are some subservient person who is a danger to your colleagues.”
“And I think these Democrats are looking forward and thinking, “What is this going to be like if I’m in the minority? And it’s just not any fun,” he continued. “And so I think Kevin’s almost certainly right; you could easily be above 30 retirements before this is over.”
Gingrich then referred to issues he thought the Republicans should address if they regained power in the House:
Controlling the border is a big, big deal. We don’t know where the 1.5 million illegal immigrants from last year — we don’t know where the Biden administration has sent them. We know they weren’t checked for COVID; they weren’t checked for criminal records; they could be in your neighborhood and you have no idea that the Biden administration is shipping people around the country. But it’s deeper than that. We had 100,000 people die last year from drug overdoses. We have an amazing number, a tragic number of suicides. We have a mental health problem which exhibits itself in these homeless towns the size of the one in Los Angeles.
Later, he pointed out that the situation in 2022 was quite different from 2016:
Look, I think we have to face the reality here; this isn’t 2016; this isn’t a country which is basically comfortable but angry. This is a country which is battered, frightened. For the first time Americans have a really deep sense that our best days are behind us, we’re very intimated by the scale of the Chinese challenge, and as I said, we have mental health problems on a scale we have never seen, largely compounded by the worst public health decisions, I think, in modern history. All of which deserves to be explored, but people want political leadership which is going to be serious, have an honest conversation, and find a way to bring us together to actually fix these things, not just have more of this totally partisan bickering.