Newt Gingrich – Served: 1979 to 1999, Speaker: 1995 to 1999
Family Background
Here’s how Gail Sheehy introduced him in her PBS Frontline interview in 1995, “From the cauldron of his childhood — the father who abandoned him, the manic depressive mother who loved him too much, the stepfather whose anger shaped the family — Newt Gingrich emerged with a heroic need that became his mission. Talking to his inner circle of family, friends, and associates, and to the Speaker himself, GAIL SHEEHY learns the details of Newt’s wars, his women, and his contract with himself.”
Here are some of Gingrich’s own words from the above interview: “My father grew up as a very angry person. When he signed up for the navy, the recruiting officer said, ‘Why did you fill out your application wrong?’ He said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said, ‘You put your grandmother’s name in where your mother’s name should be.’ He found out that he had been born out of wedlock. They never told him. Talk about being outraged!” “Big Newt was physically enormous. Six foot three, and could use a nine-pound sledgehammer with one hand. I’d say from the time he was 16 to 35 he was in bar fights…My mother was very frightened of him. So she decides to file for divorce. He tries to talk her out of it, fails, scares her even more, so she divorces him and then marries Bob Gingrich, who is also adopted…So that’s the background, and people assume I’m some right wing, out-of-touch Neanderthal who doesn’t get it. I mean, I’m adopted! Both of my fathers are adopted! I mean, give me a break!” “I was nearsighted –something I didn’t realize until I was about 12.” “They’re [father and step father] both angry. They both served in the military. They’re both physically strong. They both believe in a very male kind of toughness. They’re both totalitarian. Not much difference between them.”
Authoritarian_Traits
From Lee Howell, Newt’s press secretary in 1974, once observed, “Very candidly, I don’t think that Newt Gingrich has many principles, except for what’s best for him, guiding him.”
From Chip Kahn, ran two of Newt’s campaigns and has known him for 16 years: “I don’t know whether the ambitious bastard came before the visionary, or whether because he’s a visionary, he realizes you have to be tough to get where you need to be.”
From Mary Kahn: “Newt uses people and then discards them as useless. He’s like a leech. He really is a man with no conscience. He just doesn’t seem to care who he hurts or why.”
FromL.H. Carter, among Gingrich’s closest friends and advisors, “You can’t imagine how quickly power went to his head. The important thing you have to understand about Newt Gingrich is that he is amoral. He’s probably one of the most dangerous people for the future of this country that you can possibly imagine. He’s Richard Nixon, glib. ”
From Suzanne Garment’s book Scandal, New Gingrich “brought scandal politics unmistakenly home to the Congress.”
From John Dean, “[David] Osborne reported that Gingrich was dominating, opposed to equality, desirous of power, and amoral; he can be a bully, hedonistic, exploitive, manipulative, a cheater, prejudiced toward women, and mean-spirited, and he uses religion for political purposes; he also wants others to submit to his authority and is aggressive on behalf of authority.”
Infamous Deeds
Keep in mind that all of the following occurred while the Democrats held the majority in the House and it was Gingrich’s plan to change that. How do you do that? You make the House and the Democrats look as bad as possible. They still have a tarnished image that may never go away.
In 1984 Gingrich organized a C-Span propaganda blitz. He lined up Republicans to speak during off-hours on the House floor and say whatever they wanted to about their opponents. Later these speeches would be rebroadcast and the viewers could assume the Congressman was speaking to an occupied (but actually empty) chamber.
After Tip O’Neill, the Democratic Speaker of the House, retired in 1987, Gingrich exposed the use of large overdrafts from the House Bank by Congressmen and “portrayed the Republicans as godly and Democrats as anti-religious liberals. The Columbia Journalism Review put this and other Gingrich handy work this way, “Encouraged by the Gingrich machine, reporters took up not only the House post office scandal (a serious matter) but also the House bank overdraft affair. This was minor, involving no tax money, but they played it like another Teapot Dome. Unpaid House restaurant lunch bills of certain members became another Abscam. And so it went until the country, pining for change, dumped the Dems and put Gingrich in as Speaker.”
According to Dan T. Carter in From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, during Gingrich’s effort to oust the Democrats he provided a list of keywords to fellow Republicans for describing the Democrats as the enemy: “sick, traitors, corrupt, bizarre, cheat, steal, devour, self-serving and criminal rights.”
Once upon a time, House Committees were chaired based on a seniority system, but Gingrich abolished that and set up a centralized party-based system that reported to him as Speaker of the House.
The House workweek had been shortened to three days, and C-SPAN and electronic voting minimized Republican exposure to Democrats by keeping everyone in their offices thus making it a lot easier to call Democrats names, drop all forms of civility and take over the House in 1979.

Tom Delay – Served: 1984-2006, 1994-2006 as Majority Whip/Leader
Family Background
From Wikipedia, “DeLay has declined to comment on reports in The New Yorker that he is estranged from much of his family, including his mother and one of his brothers. DeLay has not spoken to his younger brother, Randy, a Houston lobbyist, since 1996, when a complaint to the House Ethics Committee prompted Tom DeLay to cut his brother off in order to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest.”
From New York Times June, 1999, “My father was a wildcatter typecast straight out of the movie ‘Giant’. He was a boisterous, domineering alcoholic. We were not exactly an ideal family.” He went on to say, “I was a real jerk when I got elected. Me, me, me. My job was my religion and I was mistreating my wife and daughter.”
Authoritarian Traits – “By the time we finish this poker game, there may not be a federal government left, which would suit me just fine.”
John Dean writes, “Tom Delay’s Double High authoritarian personality offers an almost textbook example of the four defining elements of a social dominator: the tendency to dominate; opposition to equality; desire for personal power; and amorality. … Delay, in a pattern followed by many Double High authoritarians, became a born-again Christian in 1984.”
From The Two Faces of Tom Delay, “his actions have been corrupt, illegal and unethical. “
According to John Dean, “Delay’s opposition to equality is less conspicuous, but it is certainly evident in the Texas redistricting plan he brokered ….”. Relative to District 23, 5 justices agreed that the Voting Rights Act had been violated.
From Chris Shays, “If it wasn’t illegal to do it, even if it was clearly wrong and unethical, and in some cases it was even illegal, they still did it. There are a lot of people who cozied up to Tom because he had so much say in their lives as a legislator and they’re going to be hurt by it.”
Relative to Tom Delay’s control of K-Street lobbyists and getting a liberal, Dave McCurdy, fired from the Electronic Industries Association lobby, John Dean wrote, “Extortion is not something that registers easily with a Double High authoritarian who is busy manipulating the world.”
Infamous Deeds
According Robert Kuttner’s America is a One-Party State, “The United States could become a nation in which the dominant party rules for a prolonged period, marginalizes a token opposition and is extremely difficult to dislodge because democracy itself is rigged. This would be unprecedented in U.S. history.” Under the section titled Legislative Dictatorship, Kuttner stated, “Political scientists used to describe America’s Congress as a de facto four-party system. There were national Democrats, mostly liberals; “Dixiecrats,” who often voted with Republicans (Congressional Quarterly called this the conservative coalition and tabulated its frequent wins); conservative Republicans; and moderate-to-liberal “gypsy moth” Republicans, who selectively voted with Democrats.” The following is also from Kuttner’s analysis.
Extreme Centralization – “The power to write legislation has been centralized in the House Republican leadership. Concretely, that means DeLay and House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s chief of staff, Scott Palmer, working with the House Committee on Rules. (Hastert is seen in some quarters as a figurehead, but his man Palmer is as powerful as DeLay.) Drastic revisions to bills approved by committee are characteristically added by the leadership, often late in the evening. Under the House rules, 48 hours are supposed to elapse before floor action. But in 2003, the leadership, 57 percent of the time, wrote rules declaring bills to be “emergency” measures, allowing then to be considered with as little as 30 minutes notice. On several measures, members literally did not know what they were voting for.”
No Amendments – “DeLay has used the rules process both to write new legislation that circumvents the hearing process and to all but eliminate floor amendments for Republicans and Democrats alike. The Rules Committee, controlled by the Republican leadership, writes a rule specifying the terms of debate for every bill that reaches the House floor. When Democrats controlled the House, Republicans complained bitterly when the occasional bill did not allow for open floor amendments. In 1995, Republicans pledged reform. Gerald Solomon, the new Republican chairman of the committee, explicitly promised that at least 70 percent of bills would come to the floor with rules permitting amendments. Instead, the proportion of bills prohibiting amendments has steadily increased, from 56 percent during the 104th Congress (1995-97) to 76 percent in 2003. This comparison actually understates the shift, because virtually all major bills now come to the floor with rules prohibiting amendments.”
One-Party Conferences – The Senate still allows floor amendments, but Senate-passed bills must go to conference with the House. Democratic House and Senate conferees are increasingly barred from attending conference committees, unless they are known turncoats. On the Medicare bill, liberal Democratic Senate conferees Tom Daschle and Jay Rockefeller were excluded. The more malleable Democrats John Breaux and Max Baucus, however, were allowed in. [See Matthew Yglesias, "Bad Max," page 11.] All four House Democratic conferees were excluded. Republican House and Senate conferees work out their intraparty differences, work their respective caucuses and send the (nonamendable) bill back to each house for a quick up-or-down vote. On the Medicare bill, members had one day to study a measure of more than 1,000 pages, much of it written from scratch in conference.
No Legislative Hearings – “Before the DeLay revolution, drafting new legislation in conference committee was almost unknown. But under DeLay, major provisions of the Medicare bill sprang fully grown from a conference committee. Republicans got a conference to include a weakened media-concentration standard that had been explicitly voted down by each house separately. Though both chambers had voted to block an administration measure watering down overtime-pay protections for workers, the provision was tacked onto a must-pass bill in conference. The official summary of House procedures, written by the (Republican-appointed) House parliamentarian and updated in June 2003, notes: ‘The House conferees are strictly limited in their consideration to matters in disagreement between the two Houses. Consequently, they may not strike out or amend any portion of the bill that was not amended by the other House. Furthermore, they may not insert new matter that is not germane to or that is beyond the scope of the differences between the two Houses.’ Like the rights guaranteed in the Soviet constitution, these rules are routinely waived.”
Appropriation Bill Abuses – “Appropriations bills are must-pass affairs, otherwise the government eventually shuts down. Traditionally, substantive legislation is enacted in the usual way, then the appropriations process approves all or part of the funding. There has long been modest abuse in the form of earmarked money for pet pork-barrel projects and substantive riders being tacked onto appropriations bills. But since Gingrich, a lot of substantive bill drafting has been centralized in House leadership task forces appointed by the majority leader. And under DeLay, Appropriations subcommittee chairs must now be approved by the leadership, as well as by the Appropriations chairman. “…DeLay has made the railroading systematic. “To enforce party discipline, the DeLay operation has also perfected a technique known as ‘catch and release.’ On close pending votes, the House Republican Whip Organization, with dozens of regional whips, will target, say, the 20 to 30 Republican members known to oppose the legislation. When the leadership gets a final head count and determines just how many votes are needed, some will be reeled in and others let off the hook and given permission to vote ‘no.’ “In short, some of these maneuvers had embryonic antecedents, but under DeLay differences in degree have mutated into an alarming difference in kind. Wright’s regime lasted just one congressional session. It ended unceremoniously when a minor ethics breach (Wright’s bulk sales of his book) was bootstrapped into a major scandal by a Republican back-bencher named Gingrich, leading to Wright’s resignation and his replacement by the far less partisan Tom Foley, and then to the Democrats’ loss of the House in 1994. DeLay’s regime shows every sign of going on and on and on — with abuses of which the Democrats never dreamed.”
John Dean, while referencing the Wall Street Journal, concluded with, “at the end of 2005 there were a staggering 13,998 earmarked expenses, costing $27.3 billion. When the Republicans took control [of the House] in 1995 there were only 1,439 earmarked items. Needless to say, there is nothing conservative in these fiscal actions but there is much that is authoritarian about the wanton spending by these Republicans.”
According to John Ydstie, “Tom DeLay was elected Majority Whip by his Republican colleagues after they took control in 1994. Almost immediately, he launched a program seeing to it that the Republicans stayed in power. It was called the ‘K Street Project’ …. The goal was to make K Street a Republican bastion so that the money contributed by K Street’s rich political action committees flowed only to Republicans.”
In September 2004, The Economist, “by gerrymandering to cram Democrats into a smaller number of super-safe seats … while spreading Republicans into a larger number of ‘designer districts which they win by 55-60%,” the Republicans have created a permanent majority and re-election rate of 99% which “North Korea might be proud of ….”
The One-vote Victory – From Juliet Eilperin, “Time and again, on high-profile bills involving Medicare, education and other programs, Hastert and his lieutenants [Tom Delay, Roy Blunt and other GOP leaders] have calibrated the likely yeas and nays to the thinnest margin possible, enabling them to push legislation as much to their liking as they can in a narrowly divided and bitterly partisan House.”

Bill Frist – Served: 1994 to 2008, Majority leader since 2003
Family Background
In 1968, Dr. Thomas F. Frist Sr. (father), Jack C. Massey and Dr. Thomas Frist, Jr. (brother) formed their own hospital management company – Hospital Corporation of America, today known simply as HCA. HCA is composed of locally managed facilities that include approximately 191 hospitals and 82 outpatient surgery centers in 23 states, England and Switzerland.
Thomas Frist, Jr. – 451st richest person in the world. Came out of retirement to help revive the company during a lengthy Medicare-fraud investigation.
Thomas Fearn Frist Sr. is widely recognized as the father of the modern for-profit hospital system.
Authoritarian Traits
From John Dean, “Frist is Richard Nixon with Bill Clinton’s brains, and Nixon was no mental slouch. Frist is without question a social dominator [authoritarian] … No one describes Bill Frist’s dominating personality better than Frist himself in his first book, Transplant: A Heart Surgeon’s Account of the Life-and-Death Dramas of the New Medicine.” In his book, Bill wrote that he could “hardly help but be a demanding little tyrant. … I ruled not just over my family but over my friends – or should I say subjects – who always opted to come to my house.”
Under the trait of “manipulating to succeed” and “justifying his own conduct,” John Dean provided the following quote from Frist’s book relative to a medical project using cats and their hearts, “Desperate, obsessed with my work, I visited various animal shelters in the Boston suburbs, collecting cats, taking them home, treating them as pets for a few days, then carting them off to the lab to die in the interest of science ….”
Infamous Deeds
Led the Senate to the brink of destroying the minority veto (filibustering) with the nuclear option.
On June 13, 2005, Frist sold his shares in HCA. This was just before HCA reported its earnings for the second quarter would not meet analyst expectations. The stock then dropped about 15 percent.
Here is what he said on Terri Schiavo, “There seems to be insufficient information to conclude that Terri Schiavo is in a persistent vegetative state. I don’t see any justification in removing hydration and nutrition.” However, an autopsy showed that Terri was not only blind but her brain had atrophied to about half its expected size.
From The Seattle Times, “Opposition to McCain and Graham was led by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the National Security Council staff and White House lobbyists. Frist ultimately voted for the amendment.”

Dick Cheney
Family Background
Cheney’s father, Richard Herbert Cheney a registered Democrat, worked as a soil conservation agent for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Dick Cheney has a brother, Bob, and a sister, Susan.
Dick met his future wife, Lynne Vincent, in high school at the age of 14. They were married in 1964 and now have two adult daughters, Elizabeth and Mary, and four grandchildren.
Authoritarian Traits
From John Dean, “the vice president is a classic Double High.”
From John Dean, “Cheney, it appears, knows how to manipulate the president like a puppet, and handles his oversized ego by making him believe ideas or decisions are his own when, in fact, they are Cheney’s.”
From John Dean, “Among the most troubling of the authoritarian and radical tactics being employed by Bush and Cheney are their politics of fear.”
Josh Marshall, wrote a piece in the Washington Monthly called, “Vice Grip: Dick Cheney is a man of principles. Disastrous Principles.” In this piece, he stated: “… they have an extreme assurance in their own judgment about what is best for the country and how to achieve it [dominating]. “ “If there are other groups (shareholders, voters, congressional committees) who agree with you, fine, you use them [exploitive, manipulative].” “Not since the Whiz Kids of the Kennedy-Johnson years has Washington been led by men of such insular self-assurance [highly self-righteous].”
Infamous Deeds
From John Dean, “It was not George Bush who came up with the idea of imposing blanket secrecy on the executive branch when he and Cheney took over.  It was not George Bush who conceived of the horrible – and in some cases actually evil – policies that typify this authoritarian presidency, such as detaining “enemy combatants” with no due process and contrary to international law.  It was not George Bush who had the idea of using torture during interrogations, and removing restraints on the National Security Agency from collecting intelligence on Americans.  These were the policies developed by Cheney and his staff, and sold to the president, and then imposed on many who subsequently objected to this authoritarian lawlessness.  It was Dick Cheney and his mentor [read bully duo], Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who convinced Bush to go to war in Iraq ….”
From John Dean, ” … the best thing Cheney did for Haliburton as Chairman and CEO was to step down and help them get no-bid contracts to rebuild Iraq and federal help with their asbestos claims liability.”
Back in 1974, Dick Cheney, Antonin Scalia and Rumsfeld convinced President Ford to veto a bill that would have strengthened the 1966 Freedom of Information Act.
He still refuses to lift the veil of secrecy on his White House Energy Task Force and he may have lied to Congress in the process.
From USA Today, “Vice President Dick Cheney has lobbied Republican senators to allow an exemption [to the use of torture] for those [terrorists] held by the CIA ….”