REPUBLICANS AND AMERICA SHOULD STAND BY THEIR MAN NEWT

Newt is the nerve center and the energy source. Going after him is like taking out command and control.

-- Rep. George Miller, D-Calif.

Over the last three years, Speaker Newt Gingrich has: Strategized and fought his way to the first Republican House majority in 40 years, gaining and holding nearly 60 seats; managed his way to the first re-elected House Republican majority in 68 years; and, as the last session ended, led that Congress to the body's highest public approval ratings in a decade. Gingrich led the Congress in passing nine of 10 items in the Contract with America, dramatically reducing the deficit and enacting important reforms from welfare to health care to telecommunications.

For his trouble, and especially for having been the flying wedge that broke up four decades of Democratic House dominance, Mr. Gingrich finds himself besieged on several fronts.

Partisan opponents led by House Democratic Whip David Bonior have, over the last three years, saddled him with no fewer than 75 alleged ethics violations that have been taken formally to the House Ethics Committee. Of these, the bipartisan committee dismissed 74 as unworthy of further action. Exactly one charge remains. It concerns whether Gingrich's attempt to teach a college course on American civilization -- Gingrich, after all, has a Ph.D in history and taught college before going to Congress 18 years ago -- somehow violated the tax-exempt status of a not-for-profit foundation that supported his effort. Big deal.

It is clear that the speaker's bitter partisan opponents are using ethics as a club to beat him, and that in doing so they have fundamentally corrupted the ethics process. Indeed, upon the likely dismissal of the remaining count, Rep. Bonior and the other Democratic attack dogs have signalled their willingness to file still more dubious ethics charges, continuing their guerrilla tactics indefinitely. This is disgraceful.

A minor flap developed over the weekend when Rep. Steve Largent, R-Okla., opined that the speaker should step aside until the ethics charges are disposed of. In short order he was echoed by two Republican colleagues from the northeast, where House Republicans didn't fare as well on Nov. 5 as they did in other parts of the nation.

Gingrich and his lieutenants quickly maneuvered to squelch this uprising, speaking to Largent and the others in an attempt to address their concerns. Rep. Largent has since publicly recanted and apologized, saying he wasn't prepared when the question came in a Sunday interview show. Given the fact that no rival has emerged, a re-elected Speaker Gingrich is now a certainty.

House Republicans need to reprise the words of the old Tammy Wynette mainstay, "Stand By Your Man," reflecting on the fact that were it not for the brilliant Gingrich, none of them would be chairman of anything. With certain brash and abrasive public comments, Gingrich has stumbled and faltered in the fleeting public opinion polls of the moment.

The national media/labor/Democratic machines have indeed done a fearsome job on him these last 24 months, and in this enterprise he has occasionally given them ammunition. But he will live to fight another day, and all Republicans should see how indispensable he remains to the long-running cause of systemic reforms that are most assuredly in the national interest.