AHC: How long could Newt Gingrich stay Speaker?

In 1998, due to a variety of factors, Gingrich left not only the Speakership, but the House entirely. Still, the Republicans managed to hold onto the House until 2006. So your challenge, with a POD after Gingrich becomes Speaker in January 1995, is to keep him as Speaker for as long as possible.
 
You'd need a whole host of things.

1) Monica Lewinsky is never transferred to the White House. That butterflies the GOP's doomed crusade on that issue.

2) GOP gains +5 in 1996 rather than losing 5.

3) Gingrich handles the government shutdown better, and the GOP wins the PR war.

4) Trent Lott does not give Clinton a 4th shot at signing PRWOR (welfare reform). Clinton still wins with a slightly reduced majority, but he's down to NAFTA, negotiated by his predecessor, as the grand centrist gesture of his presidency.

5) Gingrich stays in better touch with his backbench. Only a last minute betrayal by one of the plotters prevented his ouster in 1997. This way they have less incentive to be bitchy, since Gingrich saw himself as a French prime minister in cohabitation, with all the attendant consequences of that.

By the end, they're primed to pick up 15-20 seats in the House in 1998, and Gingrich stays. IIRC there are internal term limits for both Speakers and committee chairmen, so Gingrich would have to step down before Bush does.
 
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His extra marital affair brought him down. So have him keep his pants zipped
if Bil Clinton had not strayed, nobody would have looked into Newt's marital history. So fidelty kerrps him in office
 
IIRC there are internal term limits for both Speakers and committee chairmen, so Gingrich would have to step down before Bush does.

Are there? I wasn't aware of any. Is it more of a tradition thing like the two-term Presidential limit prior to the 22nd Amendment? Wiki says that the longest serving Speaker was Sam Rayburn. He served 17 years, but never more than 7 consecutively. The longest continuous Speakership was Tip O'Neill, who was in for 10 years.

Anyway, I could see Gingrich having problems if a Republican is elected in 2000 like OTL. Gingrich made his entire career fighting/working with Clinton, I'd be curious to see what he'd do with a President from the same party. Plus he always saw himself as the national leader of the party, and with a Republican President, he most clearly would not be. Not sure how he'd handle that.
 
Internal to the House GOP Conference.

Gingrich would work well with either Bush or McCain most likely. Since McCain had less of a domestic agenda than Bush did, Gingrich would take more of a policymaking role than he would under Bush. He'd also be working much better with Trent Lott than with Bob Dole- the two never really cottoned to each other.
 
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