Posted on 04/13/2005 3:32:17 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
The drip, drip, drip of negative stories about House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) have already accomplished one thing -- dashing the likelihood DeLay had of succeeding House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.).
Hastert, 63, was elected speaker in 1999 and may retire once President Bush leaves office in 2008. Even if Hastert stays on for a few more years, through 2010 or 2012, DeLay, who turned 58 on April 8, is young enough to wait.
Until the latest ethics controversies and other flaps, DeLay always considered becoming speaker one day a doable goal. In 1998 when the opening for speaker suddenly developed, DeLay threw his crucial support behind Hastert. It wasn't entirely selfless; it would have been impossible then for DeLay, nicknamed "the Hammer,'' to secure the near-unanimous GOP backing he needed to win.
DeLay, in turn, eventually got his promotion, becoming majority leader in 2002. In the years since Hastert became speaker, DeLay has been grooming himself to be his successor. Until now, the job may have been within reach.
I don't know if DeLay will die the Capitol Hill death of a thousand cuts, what with all the negative stories coming out. DeLay is on the defensive on several fronts: alleged fund-raising abuses; his dealings with a lobbyist under federal investigation and for a comment that seemed to threaten judges.
Remains a realist
When Terri Schiavo died, DeLay, criticizing the many judges who declined to order the reinsertion of the brain-damaged woman's feeding tube, said, "The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior.''
After the Chicago murder of the mother and husband of U.S. District Court Judge Joan Lefkow, I can just imagine how the House Democrats will use DeLay's implied threat against judges against any Republican running in the big Chicago area House 2006 contests. The elections where DeLay could be made a factor -- Rep. Melissa Bean (D-Ill.); Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-Ill.) and the seat now held by Rep. Henry Hyde, who is expected to announce his retirement after his birthday Monday.
I expect Hastert to continue to stand by DeLay. There is no reason for him not to. If DeLay comes to believe the Republican hold on the House is threatened by him, no one will have to ask him to do the best thing for the party. DeLay is a realist.
Up until these past weeks, DeLay's Texas redistricting was a win for him. Texas state lawmakers redrew congressional lines last year resulting in the Texas Republicans picking up five seats in the November elections. But DeLay's mapmaking success made him more of a target for Democrats and raised his profile in the press.
In the end, DeLay, who as whip counted votes, would see that he could not work the math to become speaker because not all the Republicans would stand by him. To be elected a majority leader, DeLay only needed a majority of the Republicans in the House; at present, that's 116 votes. To be elected speaker requires the majority of all the voting members of the House: that would be 218 votes. And that's not going to happen.
Hastert on the mend
Hastert was released from the Bethesda Naval Hospital on Tuesday morning, after being admitted for kidney stone surgery. Hastert opened the House on Tuesday but is curtailing some of his activities. He could not attend a Tuesday dinner hosted by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
The proud crowing of the msm.
I'd be a lot more interested in considering the ousting of DeLay if the Democrats would have ousted their serial felon from the White House a few years ago.
And Sandy Bergler walks...
As I see it, this situation has only two outcomes either the Democrats will succeed and this controversy will end Delay's career or they will fail and nobody will remember it at all by 2010 - 2012 when Hastert retires.
The Speaker is currently second (after the Vice President) in line to succeed to the U.S. presidency in the case of death or resignation of the President. The Speaker of the House ranks fifth in the United States order of precedence.
Tom Delay could become speaker if he had the votes.
Screw 'em, Tom. If this be war, let it begin here.
If the Dems and the MSM bash Tom DeLay long enough, public sympathy is going to turn towards the Congressman. People get tired of this sort of thing. I believe that is what happened to the Clinton's, we did not choose our fights wisely.
If he had the votes. He doesn't.
Delay isn't going to change, and neither will the Democrats. They'll keep him in their sights as long as he holds a position in Congress. They won't let it go away.
The question is ... Why have the Republicans no intestinal fortitude?
Like schooling sardines, the Republicans out number the barracudas, yet are bound to get eaten. It's just their nature.
Based on that, you or I could be elected president.
I would think DeLay has perhaps a 10% better chance than we two. ;)
Wow, that's some damning evidence of DeLay's wrongdoing put forth by that article!
Not.
Easy to figure that the reason they are doing this is to be certain that no one with guts gets leadership position.
Not anything wrong with his ethics. Dems provably do more and worse. It's just that he is too outspoken and too honest for them.
DeLay Fills a Need for the Left
American Conservative Union ^ | March 15, 2005 | David A. Keene
The left has come up with a target, and his name is Tom DeLay. He isn’t their first and won’t be their last, but for now he’s the Republican they hope to take down.
They’ve tried in the past to do the same thing to others. Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld and White House adviser Karl Rove have all been portrayed as ethically challenged and sleazy by the same folks who are now going after the House Republican leader from Texas. Trumped-up charges of illegality, paid ads and reports from ethics groups that are little more than fronts for partisan and ideological assaults on their opponents are all part of the now familiar pattern.
If the attacks on those who have come before are any guide, this will go on for some time and then subside as they find new targets on whom to vent their bile.
DeLay is far from perfect, but he’s no criminal and one doubts if any of his colleagues really believes he’s motivated by anything other than his strongly held principles and a desire to win. In fact, the argument that he’s essentially a venal inside-the-Beltway operator is probably the weakest part of the left wing’s case against him because, while one can picture him crossing the line to achieve his ideological objectives, it is impossible to visualize him doing so to make a buck.
He is, however, both tough and an in-your-face conservative who isn’t in the habit of taking prisoners and knows that his opponents aren’t going to pull their punches as they try to take him out. His problem is that the very qualities that make him an effective leader and a hero to his partisans also make him an inviting target. He no doubt considers that part of the price of leadership, and to a remarkable degree in today’s Washington he’s right.
The situation in which the left finds itself these days gives the boys and girls at MoveOn.org and the like little choice. They don’t seem very adept at winning elections, but remain convinced that the problem is not their message but that the opposition cheats or at least won’t play fair with them. Thus, the Bush forces must have somehow cheated in Ohio and elsewhere or, as Teresa Heinz Kerry apparently believes, rigged the newfangled voting machines across the country to steal the election from her sainted husband.
In their minds, no Republican or conservative could win anything on the merits, so we must all be dishonest manipulators and mean-spirited crooks of one kind or another.
The fact is that activist, ideologically driven organizations need enemies to raise money and to fuel the passions of the grassroots activists that give them their strength. We on the right have Hillary Clinton now that Bill is passé and Teddy Kennedy is too long in the tooth to pose much of a realistic threat to anybody. George Soros and his friends have their devils as well, with DeLay being chief among them.
Indeed, if he didn’t already exist they would have to invent him or move on to someone else. But he does, and their attacks on him resonate well among the committed who hope against hope that even though they couldn’t defeat Bush they might at least be able to get one of their enemies. The charges themselves matter little. At one level at least it doesn’t even matter if they do get him because the fight itself will pay dividends if they can keep it up, raise money and whip up their troops in the process.
If they actually manage to shut DeLay up or persuade his colleagues to abandon him, that would be a bonus, but one doubts if they really expect that to happen. Nor is it realistic to expect that he will actually become an electoral liability to those of his colleagues who follow his lead or who have turned to him for help. Some will remember that Republicans tried this with then-Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill (D-Mass.) a couple of decades back. It didn’t work then, and it isn’t likely to work now.
DeLay himself strikes me as a prototypical example of an inner-directed politician. He doesn’t take positions based on polls or wind direction and seems not to care a whit if his opponents don’t like him. In that sense he’s much like former Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), who during his decades here simply ignored the panting of his opponents and did the job as he saw it.
Moreover, self-interest trumps all. His colleagues know that DeLay is widely admired among conservative and Republican activists for precisely the same reasons the left despises him and that abandoning him in the face of ideological and partisan assault would not go well with the people they will need to maintain a Republican majority in the House.
David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, is a managing associate with Carmen Group, a D.C.-based governmental-affairs firm (www.carmengrouplobbying.com
The Press Shows Its Bias
TownHall.com ^ | 13 April 2005 | Linda Chavez
Tom DeLay is in a heap of trouble -- or so the media would have you believe. For weeks now, the front pages of the Washington Post and New York Times have hammered away at the House majority leader for a series of supposed transgressions. Some editorial staffer at the New York Times went so far as to try to persuade former Republican Congressman Bob Livingston to write an op-ed calling for DeLay to step aside for the good of the party, according to columnist Robert Novak. But what exactly is it that Tom DeLay is alleged to have done? After hundreds of hours of investigative work by the nation's biggest news organizations, the evidence of any actual ethical -- much less legal -- breach is pretty thin. Now contrast the media coverage of l'affaire DeLay with, say, the admission by former Clinton National Security Adviser Samuel "Sandy" Berger that he stole and destroyed classified documents that might have shed light on the Clinton administration's failure to take seriously the threat posed by al Qaeda. No wonder conservatives are a little paranoid about media bias.
Like many members of Congress and their staffs, DeLay has taken trips overseas paid for by third parties. Frankly, I think this is a lousy practice. If members or their staffs need information that can only be gleaned through traveling abroad, then the government should pick up the tab. My guess is there would be fewer trips, but so what? These trips have earned the term "junkets" for good reason. But DeLay is hardly the only member who has taken the largesse of groups trying to influence government.
The congressional ethics rules require these trips to be paid for by so-called 501(c)(3) groups, named for the tax code section that grants them exempt status. But it's silly to suggest that such groups aren't seeking influence (I should know, I've headed up several such organizations over the last 20 years). While they may not be lobbying Congress directly, such groups advocate public policy positions that can only be helped by close association with powerful senators and congressmen. Since money is fungible, it is often difficult to track whether such groups are really providing conduits for corporations or other prohibited groups to pay for the trips indirectly by making tax-deductible contributions to the policy group that then pays for the trip -- which is what the Post has tried to tar DeLay with.
In the most recent charge, the media have accused DeLay of going on a trip to Russia paid for by the National Center for Public Policy Research, which allegedly received donations second- or third-hand from Russian energy interests. So far, there's no proof that DeLay knew about, much less approved, these contributions. He might be guilty of keeping bad company -- lobbyist Jack Abramoff, currently under criminal investigation for some of his activities on behalf of Indian gaming interests, was on the Russia trip and may have ginned up the contributions that paid for it -- but at the time DeLay took the trip, he had no way of knowing how unsavory his companions were. The best way to prevent such abuse would be to prohibit any third party from paying for trips, period. But I don't see many Democrats advocating drastically changing the rules.
Which brings me to my second point. Why is it that the DeLay story has so dominated the media when the story of former Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger's amazing guilty plea produced barely a footnote? The New York Times covered the story April 2 on page 10 with fewer than 600 words. And no one in the national media has seemed very interested in exploring why Berger stole and destroyed highly classified documents. "His motives in taking the documents remain something of a mystery," the usually inquisitive Times noted blandly. The Los Angeles Times (which at least put the story on page 1) ventured this guess as to why Berger took scissors to some copies of the stolen memos but not others: "Berger was notorious for having a desk that looked like it had been hit by a hurricane, and his defenders seemed to be suggesting he had held onto some copies and cut up others in order to avoid losing them." Yeah, right.
Could it be that maybe, just maybe, the hand-written notes in the margins of some documents might have made Berger or Bill Clinton look bad? You can bet if the documents had something to do with a trip by Tom DeLay, there would be 100 reporters assigned to find out.
Linda Chavez is President of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a Townhall.com member organization.
Keep DeLay or pay the price
By Tony Blankley
I understand why the Democrats are going after Sen. Tom DeLay. Snakes gotta slither, mosquitoes gotta bite, hyenas gotta laugh and Democrats without a blooming idea in their heads gotta go negative.
I also understand why the New York Times is out soliciting Bob Livingston to write an attack op-ed against Mr. DeLay (he refused), and why they report legal, ethical, common and specifically Ethics Committee-approved activity like Mr. DeLay employing relatives on his campaign — as if it were a crime.
The owner and staff of that once great paper are so overwhelmingly committed to the Democratic Party that they are willing to destroy in a short decade the paper's reputation, which was over a hundred years in the making — to advance the great cause of soft-headed liberalism. (There must be ancient Sulzbergers and Timesmen in their graves crying yet-human tears at the sight of their heirs' profligacy.)
But as to the couple of Republicans up for re-election in a difficult Northeast district and state who, in the name of their consciences, have said slightly rude things about the majority leader of their party, I can only quote that shrewd discerner of character, Oscar Wilde: "Conscience is but the name which cowardice Fleeing the battle scrawls upon its shield."
I have been a card-carrying Republican since 1963, when my candidate, Barry Goldwater, suggested cutting off the Northeast and letting it float out to sea. It was a good idea back then, and still has some merit. Too many Republicans up there are born without backbones — which in the Republican Party is a communicable disease. Any other Republicans currently feeling their knee muscles turning to jelly should wrap their knees tightly, stick a ramrod up their dorsal side and get back in the fight.
They should remember the political maxim that while the law will take care of the guilty, when a politician is innocent of the charges being thrown at him, he can only be brought down by his own side. I have been in a lot of political fights — from the Goldwater campaign in 1964 to almost all of Ronald Reagan's fights, to slugging it out side by side with my old boss, Newt Gingrich, back in the '90s — and I've never been in one where sacrificing innocent comrades helped in the long run. Human sacrifice had been almost completely extinguished with the passing of the Aztecs — until the Republican Party came along.
Mr. DeLay has been the most effective majority whip in living memory, never having lost a vote. He has engineered passage of every vital piece of Bush legislation as majority leader (sometimes with as little as a single hard-sought vote difference). By his tough work in Texas he has almost assured Republican control of the House for at least another decade. (I say "almost," because a party of nitwits and cowards is capable of throwing away anything.) And he has done what every able leader of men has been doing since the dawn of man — he has gone hunting and brought home the meat to nourish the whole tribe. Yes. Money: The lawful collecting of which is the essential condition to politically function. If a political party doesn't have money, it doesn't have a chance.
The last chap to make much of difference in an organized way without money was Jesus Christ — who, along with a good idea, had the added advantage of being the son of God. And I can assure any of my fellow Republicans on the Hill or in the media who think the party can thrive without fighting for every last dollar: You have neither the idea nor the parentage to pull it off — even if there is a Roman numeral after your name.
Mr. DeLay has provided (and continues to provide) vital service to the party with his stubborn effort to urge K Street to follow the "one congressman, one former party staffer employed" rule in dishing out its influential positions and dollars. The informal power of Washington reflected in lobbying and public relations firms, trade associations and political law offices had been ludicrously over-represented by Democrats, years after they no longer had the committee chairman or assistant secretaries to justify it — until Mr. DeLay fought for the Washington equivalent of one man, one vote.
That was an honorable and legal fight — even though Mr. DeLay got plenty of bad press (and its derivative bad image) for doing the work at which daintier Republicans sniffed. In a thousand ways that are hard to publicly spot, the K Street effort helped all Republicans win elections, pass legislation they believed in and generally govern the country. That process will continue as long as K Street continues to respect the manliness of the Republicans.
If a party can be stampeded by phony charges and a run of shoddy stories in whorish newspapers into dumping their most effective congressional leader, I wouldn't give 2 cents for their near-term future. A party that would voluntarily cut off its own testicles and FedEx them to their opponent as a trophy, is not likely to manifest any regenerative powers. That's the thing about losing those organs.
Tony Blankley is editorial page editor of The Washington Times. His column appears on Wednesdays. E-mail: tblankley@washingtontimes.com
Thank you for those great posts!
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