Old Newt op-ed comes back to haunt him

Newt Gingrich circa 2013 tweets that the government shutdown, which led to the ongoing closure of monuments and memorials in Washington, is a bad thing.

"Every veteran and their family who can should visit Washington memorials and shame Capitol police into standing down," he wrote Sunday night. "This is petty tyranny."

But in 2011, Gingrich penned an op-ed for the Washington Post in which he argued that the 1995 shutdown he presided over as Speak of the House was a good thing, even though that, too, resulted in closed Washington sites (emphasis ours):

[Republicans] decided to stick to our principles through a very contentious and difficult period. Our attempt to balance the federal budget was distorted in the news media as an effort to ruin family vacations, frustrate visitors to the nation's capital and prevent government employees from going to work. For the Republican leadership, the effort to hold together the House and Senate caucuses while negotiating with the White House became extraordinarily exhausting.

Nonetheless, the ultimate result was the first four consecutive balanced budgets since the 1920s, paying off more than $450 billion in federal debt. We also overhauled welfare - the most successful and popular entitlement reform of our lifetime - strengthened Medicare and enacted the first tax cut in 16 years. It was this tax cut that boosted economic growth and allowed us to balance the budget four years earlier than projected. During my years as speaker, more than 8.4 million new jobs were created, reducing the national unemployment rate from 5.6 percent to 4.3 percent.

@eScarry

h/t Washington Post