Right-wing "cannot wait" for gov't shutdown, "just like in '95 and '96"

"The president has got to make it into a positive political issue to veto the appropriations bills. Remember, the only person who can close the government is the president. If you're prepared to pass the appropriations bills, he has to decide to veto a bill you have passed. And so you simply pass a bill."

[...]

"You have to consistently communicate key messages because the presidency is such a powerful instrument," he said. "I think this city has fundamentally misunderstood what happened with the shutdown. To most of the country, it became a signal that we were serious...If we win we have every right to say 'the American people have spoken."

Asked if he would encourage the Republicans to push for a shutdown, Gingrich said that the GOP needs to be ready to stand on principle.

"It's especially important that they keep their word to the American people," he told The Hill. "[They] can't be intimidated...you have to believe what you believe in."

Dave Weigel reported that Gingrich similarly encouraged Republicans to send Obama a budget which refused to fund health care reform, and see if Obama "decide[s]...he's going to veto the bill" or not. From Wiegel's April 13 report:

At a luncheon at the Heritage Foundation -- his second meeting with conservative journalists and bloggers today -- Newt Gingrich expanded a bit on his argument, made most recently at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, that a new Republican Congress could roll back the Democrats' victory on health-care reform by refusing to fund it. I asked Gingrich how this would work, given the experience of Republicans in the winter of 1995 when a showdown over the budget forced a government shutdown.

"Wait a second," said Gingrich. "This is the standard, elite, inside-the-Beltway worldview. Tell me in what way we didn't win. After that, we got to a balanced budget. And what happened to the Republican majority?" The answer, of course, is that Republicans held the majority in 1996, while President Bill Clinton was reelected.

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Gingrich, having argued that the 1995 shutdown was good for Republicans, argued that a potential battle over health care would be even better. "There's a new poll out this morning," said Gingrich, referring to a Rasmussen Reports study. "By 58 to 38, people want to repeal the health-care bill. It'll get worse as people learn more and as the failure of the bill becomes more obvious. So if you take that model, all the Republican Congress needs to say in January is, 'We won't fund it.' What the president needs to decide is: He's going to veto the bill. He needs to force a crisis on an issue that's a 58 to 38 issue. And it's going to get worse. It'll be 2 to 1 or better by the time we get down to the fight. Because this bill is terrible."

I followed up with Gingrich after the speech, largely to clarify how Clinton's reelection figured into this recollection of the shutdown. According to Gingrich, Clinton simply over-matched the Republicans in 1996 and skillfully made the speaker of the House his target. The ability of Republicans to hold onto Congress was impressiveness nonetheless. "I always look back on the budget fight as the moment our base decided we were real, that we weren't just politicians," said Gingrich. "I believe -- and John Kasich and Bob Livingston agree with me -- if we had backed off, we never would have gotten to a balanced budget."