Newt’s new ’21st Century Contract’ is a work in progress

Matt K. Lewis Senior Contributor
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Will Rahn and I have a preview up of Newt Gingrich’s “21st Century Contract with America.” One of the interesting things we reveal is that — although Gingrich plans to release the broad framework in Iowa this week — he won’t actually finish the Contract for over a year:

He explained that as a presidential candidate he cannot “negotiate with [Speaker John] Boehner and [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell” — and get them to buy-in at this point, because “it is going to take the prestige of becoming the nominee with a contract to get them to decide that this is a direction.”

One of the areas we know the Contract will cover is judicial reform. Always quotable, Gingrich told The Daily Caller: “I’ve gone from being critical of the judges to advocating a Jeffersonian response, which in some cases would actually abolish the judgeships.”

Aside from the Contract, Gingrich also had some interesting things to say about his campaign. “It is my fault, not theirs,” he said of the consultants who resigned from his team earlier this year. “It had never occurred to me that what I wanted to do was so fundamentally different from everything they were used to. And that is a core problem.”

Make sure to read our full column here.

Matt K. Lewis