Newt Gingrich on Fox & Friends | October 13, 2020

Newt Gingrich discusses Amy Coney Barrett's hearing, Joe Biden's court packing predicament, and early voting on Fox & Friends

Transcript:

NEWT:

I thought Ted Cruz captured perfectly what was going on when he said the reason none of the Democrats are focused on Judge Barrett is they don't have anything that is useful that they can say. So, they were attacking Trump, they were worried about Obamacare, and worried about abortion, they weren’t going straight at her. If you look at what they did to other conservative nominees, it is astonishing how little they went after her person. I suspect they are kind of trapped right now. She’s very attractive, she’s a woman who has really achieved almost a miracle. Seven children, appeals court judge, so I think the Democrats, one of the lessons they learned out of losing the Senate seats in 2018, was if you're really nasty, you hurt yourself. I think it's doubly true if you are really nasty to a woman and I think that, you know, if the party talks about mansplaining, it's a little hard to imagine how they are going to take on Amy Coney Barrett. So my guess is it's going to be dignified. It's going to be sort of an intellectual level: “What's your theory of this or that? How do you react to when the Justice Ginsburg said X or Justice Scalia said Y.” I don't think any of them want to get in a head on fight with her. There’s also the fact, I think, that she is probably smarter than any of them. You look at her track record and that's the point that Ted Cruz made. He said, “None of us graduated first.” I think if she has, she will more than hold her own.

No, first of all, I was briefly reassured this week when he said he was running for the Senate. I really felt like maybe he’d found the right slot. He did say that. He may realize he can't be Commander-in-Chief, which he won’t be, I think Kamala Harris will dominate that administration from day one. But, having said that, here’s his problem: It’s easy for him to end this conversation and say “No, I will oppose packing the court.” He can't say that because his left will go crazy because they want to pack the court. On the other hand, he knows over two thirds of the American people oppose packing the court. So what he did yesterday, which is pretty good politics, showed just a little bit of leg to the middle. “Oh, gee, I really don't like the idea.” Now he’ll get some angry phone calls and he can say, “Hey, I didn't roll it out. If we have to, we will deal with it.” So he’s trying to walk down both sides of the road just as he does on fracking, where really funny videos that show him saying “I'm for banning fracking. I guarantee you I will never ban fracking. I'm for eliminating all fossil fuels. I really love Pennsylvania.” I mean, if you watch this stuff, if it wasn't for videotape, you wouldn't realize how profoundly dishonest Joe Biden is but he is that profoundly dishonest.

I have a friend who says he spent 11 hours. He said there were over 1,000 people in line. At one point, the county government got so scared of just the people being unhappy that they bought them all pizza. He said here we are in the middle of all the warnings about COVID, nobody has a mask on, nobody is social distancing, everybody is eating with their hands. He said it was crazy. But I do think there’s a big pent up desire to vote among both the Democrats and Republicans although organized differently, both of them have a very substantial turnout the vote effort. I think this may well be the largest election turnout in American history by the time it gets done. And you see that with the early requests. Certainly, in Georgia yesterday, they had 100 vans that the Democrats had paid for that were taking people to the polls.

Well, the fact that they have the long line over three weeks before the election, strikes me as not very suppressed. If you’re a modern Democrat, you are trained to say certain key words over and over again. You know, the Republicans are racists, xenophobic, misogynist, antifemale, whatever the list is. You get trained from childhood. You know Republicans suppress votes and therefore they don't want to allow for example, illegal immigrants to vote. They don't want to allow people to vote if you don't know who they are. All that translates for Democrats into voter suppression. It's just a set of code words they train their people into and they do a pretty good job. If you watched yesterday, almost every Democrat had exactly the same script. “This is really about the Affordable Care Act; this is a first for my state who has a terrible story to tell and I really feel terrible about that.” They are trying to set up the emotion of I'm trying to defend people back home and here is this nominee by the Republicans. If they could get away with it, they would never mention her name. She would just sort of be the Trump nominee, but of course they do mention her name, and that's why I suspect they are losing ground every day.