If you don't have this fear about Newt Gingrich it's because you've been taken in by his rhetoric or else haven't paid sufficient attention to his record of caving into business as usual.

Can't it all be down to not being an undisciplined megalomaniac with a penchant for insisting on "fundamentally reforming" everything with ill-conceived, overly complicated plans that in some cases require creating new bureaucracies? Because that plus ethics scandals is Newt Gingrich.

I'm with Ross Douthat: "I am at a loss to identify the “big ideas” and “big solutions” that he is supposedly campaigning on. Yes, he has an implausible supply-side tax plan, but you never hear him talk about it. He has technically signed on to some form of entitlement reform, but you never hear him talk about that, either. Instead, so far as I can tell, his “idea-oriented” campaign consists almost entirely of promising to hold Lincoln-Douglas-style debates with President Obama, grandstanding about media bias and moderator stupidity, defending his history of ideological flexibility much more smoothly than Mitt Romney, and then occasionally throwing out a wonky-sounding notion (like, say, outsourcing E-Verify to American Express) that’s more glib than genuinely significant. His last-minute momentum in South Carolina, which last night’s debate did nothing to derail, has been generated almost exclusively by the politics of ressentiment: If he wins the Palmetto State primary, it will be because conservative voters don’t much like the mainstream press, and Gingrich has mastered the art of taking tough questions and turning them into dudgeon-rich denunciations of the liberal media and all its works."

Jon Huntsman was a conservative governor of Utah for 8 years. He is running on the Paul Ryan budget, which is far more conservative than anything that will ever pass Congress. And he knows far more about China, the most important foreign policy challenge of our era, than any other candidate. Any worthwhile approach to evaluating candidates would emphasize these things far more than the way he presented himself to the media when he started running for president. It's the difference between style and substance. And that the opposite has happened tells me that Republicans this year are much more influenced by style -- an impression that is bolstered by the rise of candidates like Herman Cain, who is more transparently unqualified to be Commander in Chief than any presidential candidate in memory, and Newt Gingrich, whose record is so much more liberal than Huntsman that no self-respecting Tea Partier should prefer the former speaker.

Diane, you're right to give him another look. Stuart, how someone runs a campaign tells us very little about how they'd run the country. See Barack Obama.

It is striking if typical that all the Iran hawks reason this thing out at 5,000 feet, and pay literally no attention to the actual logistics of trying to eliminate Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons through military force. There is not even an attempt to assess the likelihood of success, the consequences of failure, the money spent, the lives lost, the capacity for retaliation and the ability to damage our strategic interests elsewhere. It isn't that the hawks carefully weighed these things and concluded that a military strike is the way to go. They just don't even bother to ask these questions at all, just like they didn't bother to game out the postwar period in Iraq. They're armchair generals in the worst way possible, and didn't even learn from their last mistaken adventure.(Note that this isn't a criticism of Yoo, but something his piece made me realize).

So to be clear, John Yoo thinks that the president assumes near dictatorial power when the United States is at war, cheers on war-making – as he did after the Libya conflict – even when Congress does not declare war, and now argues that making war is justified even when there is no imminent threat from a foreign nation. What could possibly go wrong with this mix of views?

So you're saying he's a politician!

I'll say it again.

No Child Left Behind.

The Harriet Miers nomination.

Medicare Part D.

Comprehensive immigration reform.

Newt Gingrich supported them all. Even as he was trading on his time in Congress to earn $1.6 million from Freddie Mac. And opposing The Surge, which is fine by me, but anathema to most conservatives.

If he wins the GOP nomination the Tea Party will indeed be a failure.

Newt Gingrich supported all of the following during the Bush years:

TARP

Medicare Part D

No Child Left Behind

Comprehensive immigration reform

The Harriet Miers nomination

My impression was that conservatives were very angry about all those things and determined to never again back he sort of man who would favor them. Yet here we are. He is surging.

Newt isn't a stock or a bond, he's a credit default swap: everyone forgets about him until the whole system is imploding due to foolish-in-hindsight investments in overvalued quantities. And he doesn't save the system so much as reveal its fundamental corruption.

Appreciate the responses from everyone, and James, you're persuasive as always, but I find myself arriving here:

-- Perhaps I am right, and the "constitutional conservatives" are in fact at peace with unconstitutional measures.

-- Or perhaps James is right, and every constitutional question from executive war powers to the individual mandate is sufficiently contested that it's impossible to say, "by embracing x, you lose the right to claim the constitution as the main guiding light of your political philosophy."

It seems like either way, constitutional conservatives have a big problem. Because their whole movement is premised on the fact that there is one objectively correct take on the constitution, and they are its champions.Rights?

This assumes a lot.

Let's revisit some of my actual complaints. The drug war. The legal corners cut to kill AlAwlaki. The Libya invasion. Warrant-less wiretapping. Asset forfeiture. Am I to believe that these powers are plausibly being seized to save us from nuclear oblivion? That the destruction of our union might result if the president is forced to go to the trouble of getting warrants and declarations of war? Is the underwear bomber supposed to be comparable to the Confederacy?  Even if your argument holds in theory, it can hardly justify the excesses I am complaining about.

James,

Initial thoughts.

1) If "constitutional conservatives" want to embrace what they take to be a Lincolnian understanding of the executive, that's fine, but they should get a new name, and start invoking him rather than the Founders. They should also remember Lincoln is the man who wrote this:

The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.

2) There just are serious disagreements between serious legal theorists as to whether the the Constitution permits the individual mandate. What is the existence of serious disagreements supposed to imply?

The Founders understood war to be something declared by Congress against nation states. The War on Terrorism is effectively a global fight against a vaguely defined enemy -- or is it against a tactic? -- that has no discernible end, or any particular way to measure progress, except that lack of terrorist attacks justify the power given the government, and terrorist attacks necessitate giving the government more power. And I wonder if you can cite anything to prove that the Founders understood the need for an unconstrained executive in wartime.

This argument always goes here:

Sounds familiar, Duane. It's basically what liberals say in the course of arguing for a living, breathing Constitution that permits everything under the sun via the Commerce Clause. Anyone who objects is told, "but look at all the decades of precedence and jurisprudence that support the federal role that I want to see expand." At least those liberals don't claim to be "originalists" or "constitutional conservatives." They acknowledge their departure from the Founding document, insisting it was meant to evolve.

Actually, I think that Tea Partiers are more likely to police themselves -- they don't have the same ideological commitment to being inclusive, reaching decisions by consensus, and letting everyone speak. But I also think it is more centrally organized. There are a handful of Tea Party groups that claim leadership of the movement. And particular groups tend to sponsor the rallies, get permits, etc.

That just isn't the case with OWS.

Amish Dude,

If there's one thing we can say about Occupy Wall Street, it's that there is nothing that can be called "leadership." I think there are ways to grok what the movement is about, but attributing a moment of silence in one city for a guy most of the people there probably hadn't heard of to a nationwide movement? It makes no sense. Do you honestly think a majority or even a substantial number of Occupy Wall Street folks are cool with assassination attempts on Obama? Come on.