Delaying Delay's downfall

by David Grand
December 2, 2004

Like many congressmen before him, who because of their long tenure and positions of power believed they were untouchable and who could flout the law with impunity, the House Majority Leader Tom the "Hammer" Delay will also hang himself probably sooner than later.     

That's true no matter how much more rope his colleagues have given him by voting behind closed doors to change a party rule requiring lawmakers to step down from leadership positions if indicted for a crime that could bring a prison term of at least two years, thereby reversing one of the reforms they'd adopted a decade ago after regaining control of Congress after 40-years to distinguish themselves from the imperialistic, unethical Democrats.      

But even if he is indicted for political corruption by that grand jury in Austin, Texas (as three of his associates have already been for channeling corporate donations into the state's legislative races), Rep. Henry Bonilla, R-Texas, said that would not automatically mean he'd have to be removed, for under that rule change the House Republican Steering Committee would have 30 days to review the indictment and decide whether to recommend to all House Republicans if he should remain as their leader, or whether they consider it as frivolous and can be ignored.      

Or as Bonilla put it astonishingly, "it would take power away from any partisan crackpot district attorney who may want to bring down party leaders to make a name for himself." Talk about stacking the deck against Delay ever biting the dust. and the disrespect it shows for the states' courts.       

And Delay brazenly pushing the law to the limits rekindles memories of the adverse effects of holding too much power for too long can have on that institution.  For who can forget that series of scandals in the late 1980s and 1990s relating to questionable fundraising practices and abuses of congressional privileges that clearly reveal that neither party can claim to hold the moral high ground:

• House Speaker Jim Wright, D-Texas, resigning from Congress in 1989 after an ethics investigation (spurred on by Newt Gingrich) into a controversial book deal he used to get around fundraising limits.
• Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, D-Illinois, resigning in 1994 after indicted for misuse of federal funds.
• An investigation in 1991 revealing that hundreds of members of both parties had written "bad" checks that had been paid by the House Bank, and laundered money through the House Post Office.
• Newt Gingrich, R-Georgia, Speaker of the House, censured by his colleagues in 1997 for organizing a political action group that violated tax laws, later resigning over an extramarital affair.
• Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Oregon, resigning in 1995 for his "sexual improprieties," based on complaints by 26 women on the Hill that he'd made unwanted sexual advances toward them.

As regards the latest charges in Texas against Delay (who was recently admonished three times by the bipartisan House Ethics Committee for creating the "appearance of impropriety" ), the most serious one is that he engineered a successful redistricting plan through the Texas Legislature to secure GOP control, and oversaw the redrawing of congressional district lines that sent four new Texas GOP members to Washington, which consolidated Republican control in the House.

The reaction of that prosecutor Ronnie Earle to Delay's contention that he's an innocent target of the "politics of personal destruction by an overzealous Democratic prosecutor" was priceless: "This investigation is a lot like clown coming out of  Volkswagen in the circus," he said. "There's always another clown coming out." He doesn't sound like a crackpot to me with that sense of humor.      

And it's no wonder that humorists from Mark Twain and Will Rogers to Jay Leno and David Letterman have used Congress as the butt of many jokes.