Politics & Power Quote by Newt Gingrich

“It is time” is the tell: Gingrich frames fiscal policy as overdue moral housekeeping, not a technical debate. The line is built to sound like inevitability, the kind of commonsense urgency that turns a complicated set of tradeoffs into a single, righteous next step. A “balanced budget amendment” isn’t just a rule; it’s a constitutional cudgel, elevating budgeting preferences into permanent law and shrinking the space for future majorities to choose a different path.

The subtext is discipline-by-constraint. By insisting the government must “return” to “limited spending,” Gingrich smuggles in a nostalgia claim: that there was a healthier, more restrained America before Washington lost its way. It’s a classic small-government narrative that doesn’t name the painful specifics: which programs get cut, what happens in recessions when deficits rise automatically, or how emergencies and wars tend to blow up any tidy ledger. The amendment language also shifts blame. If spending is capped by the Constitution, politicians can posture as defenders of “responsibility” while pointing to the amendment when constituents demand services.

Context matters because Gingrich is the architect of modern Republican confrontational fiscal politics, especially the 1990s push to make deficit anxiety a cultural weapon. This sentence reads like that era’s governing style in miniature: use procedural hardball and moral rhetoric to turn budget questions into identity questions. You’re either for “limited spending,” or you’re for governmental indulgence. That binary is the point.