In Sunday’s National Review online, Newt Gingrich writes: “Congress was designed by the Founding Fathers to move slowly, precisely to avoid the sudden panic of a one-week solution that becomes a 20-year mess.”

In a conversation with NPR’s Melissa Block, Gingrich says he  thinks the bailout plan is “just wrong,” and that “it’s likely to fail, and it’s east jump likely to make the situation worse over time.”

And I think that [U.S. Treasury] Secretary [Henry] Paulson has shown almost no understanding of how a democracy operates. His initial draft would have given him $700 billion of your tax money with no oversight, no judicial review, no accountability. I mean, we’re not a dictatorship.

Well, I think they’re just wrong. I think we need to slow down, take a deep breath, hold public hearings, have experts testify, understand exactly what the agreement would be, where the money would go, how we would account for it. I don’t think the taxpayers should be socked for $700 billion for welfare for Wall Street. I think it’s fundamentally wrong, and I think that it is very likely to create a bureaucratic control of our financial system in a way that will cripple us for 20 years.