Gingrich Column: ‘I Signed the Pledge To Repeal Obamacare, Have You?’

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA)
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Amidst Newt Gingrich’s attempts at damage control over his criticism of Paul Ryan’s Medicare privatization proposal, and his own past support for the individual health insurance mandate, Newt Gingrich took another step — not only publicly signing a pledge in Iowa to repeal President Obama’s health care reform law, but publishing a column in the right-wing Human Events on Wednesday, entitled, “I Signed the Pledge To Repeal Obamacare, Have You?”

The column begins:

Yesterday [Tuesday] in Mason City, Iowa, I signed the Obamacare Repeal Pledge, sponsored by the Independent Women’s Voice and American Majority Action.

Obamacare is such a massive and complex power grab of a law that there are countless specific reasons to oppose the law.

The column declares the first of the many reasons to repeal the law: “It’s unconstitutional. Period,” and argues vigorously against the individual mandate, calling it “an assault on our country’s founding principles of limited, clearly delineated federal powers and an erosion of the rule of law.” Totally unmentioned in the column, of course, is that Gingrich himself advocated for an individual mandate, going back to 1993 and even just until a few years ago (and last weekend, too).

Then again, Gingrich did seem to say during an interview with Greta Van Susteren on Tuesday that this was a function of presenting a “conservative alternative” in order to oppose pushes by Hillary Clinton and others for government-run health care. So perhaps he shouldn’t be accused of ever having actually meant it.

And as Gingrich has also said, remembering such past views, as opposed to his more recent ones, is an act of “political amnesia.”

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