NEWT'S CASH MACHINE

LAST WEDNESDAY WAS A BIG night for House Speaker Newt Gingrich. About 75 supporters were gathered at the Washington mansion of auto dealer Mandell Ourisman and his wife Mary, a former official of GOPAC, the political-action committee Gingrich headed until last May. The occasion was a fund raiser for his newest PAC, called Monday Morning. For a couple of pleasant hours the guests picked at their beef tenderloin, admired the Ourismans' baby grand piano and chatted up the most powerful man in Congress. At $1,000 a couple, the posh event yielded more than $30,000 in campaign money for G.O.P. congressional candidates.

It was a big night for one other reason. Earlier Gingrich had got word that the House ethics committee had made a crucial decision. After months of wrangling on a list of complaints brought against him by Democrats, the 10-member panel, which is evenly divided between the two parties, had settled on a good news/bad news outcome. By a unanimous vote, it cleared Gingrich of three charges and slapped his wrist on three others. And of the $4.5 million advance for his recent book that he accepted, then declined, from the publishing company owned by Rupert Murdoch, a media magnate with magnate-style business before Congress, the committee declared it unseemly but within the rules.

What mattered, however, was the committee's decision to appoint an outside counsel to investigate whether Gingrich improperly used tax-deductible donations to fund the videotaped college course Renewing American Civilization, that he taught until earlier this year. The crowd at the Wednesday fund raiser applauded loudly when Gingrich told them the six charges had finally been resolved. As for the seventh, he said, it was a "technical'' matter. That line was echoed the next day by other members of the G.O.P. leadership. House Republican Conference chairman John Boehner of Ohio faxed around a 1994 letter by a former irs commissioner who stated that in his view, there was no problem.

Democrats prefer to remember the 1988 investigation of House Speaker Jim Wright, whose chief accuser was Gingrich. Then too the ethics committee dismissed nearly all complaints against Wright but asked for a special counsel to investigate the remaining one. Eventually the counsel requested and was granted the authority to look wherever he felt he needed to. More harmful disclosures ensued. Wright resigned. Calculating the prospects for Gingrich, House minority whip David Bonior of Michigan assumed his most sepulchral tones: "As time passes, the gravity of the situation will set in."

The ethics committee decision came a week after the Federal Election Commission released thousands of pages of documents in a civil lawsuit charging, among other things, that GOPAC spent $250,000 to fund Gingrich's re-election at a time when it was barred by law from involvement in federal races. House Democrats plan to use the documents as a basis for at least one new complaint before the ethics committee, including one that GOPAC donors got return favors from Gingrich. None of this will help stay the collapse of the Speaker's general popularity. In a Time/cnn poll conducted last week by Yankelovich Partners, only 24% of those questioned said they had a favorable impression of Gingrich, vs. 56% unfavorable.