Newt Gingrich has issued a letter asking his supporters to get members of Congress to take a pledge that they will not participate in a lame duck session following the November election because it ignores “the will of the people” and “smacks of the worst kind of political corruption.”

Gingrich compares such a session to a lame duck session that followed the election of 1800, in which the Federalist Congress passed major legislation even after “the country thoroughly repudiated the Federalist Party.” Gingrich asks, “Are the Democrats about to make the same mistake the Federalists made?”

Somehow, Gingrich missed a much more recent example -- which is kind of odd, because he participated in it. I'm referring, of course, to the impeachment of President Clinton, which occurred during the 1998 lame duck session that followed crushing Republican election losses that were attributed to their inquisition of the president.

Gingrich, of course, as Speaker of the House, had been the ringleader of that inquisition. He famously declared on the House floor that he would “never again, as long as I am speaker, make a speech without commenting on this topic” of Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky, and approved “a final-week blitz of scandal ads that aired in 30 key districts” before the election.

But rather than obey “the will of the American people” and cancel the impeachment hearings, or at least push them back until after the new Congress had been seated, the Republican Congress pressed forward with the hearings. And while Gingrich had announced that he was planning to step down from the speakership and resign from the House in disgrace, he remained the Speaker on the day the House passed articles of impeachment against President Clinton.

Gingrich, of course, voted for all four articles.

One might say his actions “smack of the worst kind of political corruption.”