On one issue, Elizabeth Warren gives ‘three cheers to Speaker Gingrich’

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) have found one thing they agree on.

The liberal senator and architect of the “Republican Revolution” on Monday appeared together at a panel event urging increased funding for federal research programs.

{mosads}Gingrich said that one of the “most fiscally responsible steps we can take” as a country is to boost research funding for diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and cancer. He said one of the regrets of his speakership in the 1990s is that he did not triple funding for the National Science Foundation (NSF).

“Three cheers to Speaker Gingrich,” Warren said in response.

Warren has championed the work of the NSF, the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration in the Senate. She and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) have been hosting panels this year aimed at middle class economics, and on Monday they invited Gingrich to address the issue of funding for those agencies.

Gingrich, a former history professor, has been an advocate for research funding during his political career. In recent months he has been pushing the Republican majorities in Congress to double funding for the National Institutes of Health, as his own majority did under President Clinton.

“From a fiscal as well as a human perspective, finding cures for these diseases is urgent,” Gingrich said Monday. “We are right at the edge of breakthroughs right now.”

Warren said that while she didn’t think “the late 1990s was the golden age of non-partisanship,” she praised Gingrich for increasing funding to some research programs.

Gingrich said he was able to achieve that in part because of his relationship with Clinton.

“We could fight all morning and negotiate all evening,” Gingrich said. “You have to place the country above whatever your fights are.”