Posted on 04/25/2005 4:33:34 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
DeLay family specialist Dr. Samuel Ward Casscells III had an urgent message for the beleaguered Republican House speaker. So Casscells hurried over to a formal awards dinner Friday in downtown Houston where DeLay had just given the keynote address and scanned the packed auditorium.
DeLay's ill father-in-law, at whose bedside DeLay had spent hours keeping vigil, had taken a turn for the worse.
DeLay would want to know.
"He's not a barrel of laughs," Casscells said of the congressman. "But when the chips are down, he's there with his family."
This is not the Tom DeLay the world sees, of course. DeLay, the second-most important man in the U.S. House of Representatives and a politician credited with helping orchestrate his party's rise to dominance in America, has become one of the most powerful and feared men in Washington.
He also is at the center of a widening ethics scandal, and there are those who have little sympathy for him.
DeLay, who has been called "The Meanest Man in Congress," has a reputation for getting even with opponents, instilling party discipline, and squeezing big bucks from lobbyists. He has a nickname, too: "The Hammer."
The voice of conservatives, DeLay is a vocal opponent of environmental regulations perceived too stringent, judges and the media perceived too liberal, and schools perceived as insufficiently religious.
He's also known as Teflon Tom for his ability to survive scandal.
So who is this 58-year-old devout Southern Baptist? How did he rise from an obscure suburban exterminator to the firebrand politician he is today? And why does he attract such controversy?
Some answers can be found in Fort Bend County, the base of his overwhelmingly Republican, overwhelmingly suburban District 22 along Houston's southern edge.
Like Texas and the South, Fort Bend County flipped from blue to red in the course of 20 years. President Bush carried it with 60 percent of the vote in the past election. DeLay captured 55 percent. Of the 30 or so local officeholders, only three are Democrats.
In this fast-growing region of upscale strip malls, golf courses and churches — there are 209 of the latter, the phone book shows — DeLay's conservative message long has resonated.
It resonates with Carlos Zimmermann, 65, who recently was sat with his wife and two granddaughters eating ice cream in the new public square in Sweetwater — just up the road from where DeLay and his wife, Christine, live in a brick house surrounded by golf courses.
Zimmermann doesn't flinch when DeLay talks about his goal of establishing a God-centered nation or reigning in judges he calls extremist. And he doesn't believe a word of what he reads in the newspapers.
"Garbage," he said.
While DeLay never has lost an election in his 27 years in office, trouble lurks. In a poll commissioned by the Houston Chronicle earlier this month, 45 percent of voters surveyed in his district said they would vote for someone else if the election were today. Only 38 percent said they would re-elect DeLay.
DeLay's opponent last November, Democrat Richard Morrison, said he's up for a rematch in 2006. So far, he said, 7,000 donations have poured in from every state in the union.
Opposition is palpable and growing, and that makes fellow Republicans nervous. Could Tom DeLay actually be beaten in the very conservative district he helped redistrict? Now facing investigation by the House Ethics Commission, is he sinking at home?
Fort Bend County Republican chairman Eric Thode doesn't think so, but he won't rule it out.
"Anyone can be beat," Thode said.
DeLay spokesman Dan Allen said his boss "takes every election seriously and every campaign seriously."
"Next year," Allen said, "will be no different."
In the spotlight
DeLay has not let trouble quiet him. "Ladies and Gentlemen," he said last week during the keynote address at a formal dinner of the National Rifle Association's annual convention, "it isn't just our homes that need protection, it's our freedom ! Freedom! Ladies and Gentlemen! America and freedom!"
DeLay was amid the home crowd in Houston and he was rolling, hitting the themes he likes to hit: God, Country, Liberty and Self-Defense.
The 3,000-member crowd roared its approval.
DeLay returns to his district almost every week, speaking to safe audiences. Friday, when Cascells was looking for him, he was at a black-tie awards dinner at the Rotary National Award for Space Achievement Foundation.
When he addressed the National Rifle Association the week before, he was every bit as animated — even though a day earlier a fellow arch-conservative, Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado, had become the second Republican Congressman to call for him to step aside.
"Freedom, ladies and gentlemen!" Delay told cheering members of the NRA, "God gives it ... and together we will defend it."
In the weeks since allegations over misconduct have intensified, DeLay, who did not respond to interview requests for this story, has gone on the offensive. He has slammed what he called "an arrogant, out-of-control, unaccountable judiciary" for its refusal to reinsert a feeding tube into Terry Schiavo, the Florida woman at the center of the high-profile right-to-die case.
"The time will come," DeLay said, "for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior." Though he later apologized for the "inartful" remark, he repeatedly has stated that he believes Congress should hold judges accountable for their decisions.
"We set up the courts. We can unset the courts," he was quoted as saying.
Some of his most ardent supporters wish he'd tone it down.
"I wouldn't say the same things," said Thode, the Fort Bend County Republican chairman. As a former spokesman for Enron, Thode knows a thing or two about disaster management.
"Maybe I'd be better in front of the cameras," he said.
Thode wishes DeLay would answer his critics, he said.
Last year the House Ethics Committee admonished DeLay on three separate occasions. The panel concluded DeLay had created the appearance of giving donors special access; improperly called in the Federal Aviation Administration in the Texas dispute over redistricting; and pressured a fellow lawmaker to vote his way on a key bill.
Newspapers in recent weeks have carried reports of his numerous lobbyist-funded overseas trips and a total of $500,000 in payments his wife and daughter received from his political-action and campaign committees over five years.
Meanwhile, the Travis County district attorney has indicted three close DeLay allies on criminal charges of illegal campaign contributions. District Attorney Ronnie Earle won't say if DeLay is next.
Last week, in a detailed letter to his supporters back home, DeLay finally responded to his critics.
He denied wrongdoing and attributed the attention given them to a hostile "syndicate" of Democrats, their media supporters and outside interest groups.
'The Hammer' forged
DeLay was born in Laredo in 1947, the middle of three boys. His father, who worked in the oil fields, was a stern disciplinarian. He was an alcoholic, too. DeLay moved often with his family around Texas and to Venezuela, where the family lived for six years in the 1950s. There the young brothers learned to crack whips and rope steers, according to a biography of DeLay titled "The Hammer: Tom DeLay: God Money and the Rise of the Republican Congress."
In 1960, the family settled in a suburb of Corpus Christi. DeLay dominated politics and football in high school. It was there that he met Christine Furrh, a cheerleader and his future wife.
He went on to attend Baylor University, ran with the wild crowd, was nearly expelled and later withdrew. He ended up at the University of Houston, where he graduated with a biology degree, and took a job mixing rat bait for a pest-control business before establishing his own exterminating company.
Whatever conservative political leanings he may have had growing up with an oilman father were cemented once he became a businessman and had to deal with government regulators and pay taxes. DeLay likened the EPA to the German Gestapo.
DeLay concluded there was only one way to fight back: He would change the laws. In the summer of 1978, he announced his candidacy for a vacant House seat. His slogan: Honest. Effective. Independent.
He beat his opponent, a Democrat, by 2,000 votes in a solidly Democratic county. Five other Republicans also won handily that year, giving the group an affectionate nickname: the Texas Six-Pack.
The tide was turning in Texas, and in few places was that more evident than in Sugar Land, the heart of Fort Bend County and DeLay's current home.
By the 1970s Sugar Land had gone from a company town controlled by sugar barons into a fast-growing Houston suburb, enriched by the oil and gas boom.
Like elsewhere in Texas, Democrats were losing their grip on power.
As a fresh-faced freshman in a minority party, DeLay's tenure in the Texas House was unremarkable.
"He was a backbencher," said A.R. (Babe) Schwartz, a Democrat who served at the time in the Senate.
"I don't have any impression of him," he said.
"I didn't see any trails he was blazing," agreed Rep. Senfronia Thompson, the longtime Democrat from Houston who served with DeLay. "He wasn't on the mic hardly any."
What he was known for was partying — which earned him the nickname "Hot Tub Tom."
Thompson didn't see that side of Tom but she remembered him as a "happy-go-lucky guy."
Backbencher or not, DeLay ran for Congress in 1984 and won that race, too. This time around, with Ronald Reagan in the White House and the Republicans winning seats across the South, decimating the Democratic Party along the way, he would not be window dressing. DeLay would become the "go-to fix-it" man who could deliver votes for key GOP legislation like welfare reform and the Contract with America.
He also could deliver for his district, bringing home much needed transportation dollars.
By the time he was elected House Majority Whip in 1994 — the year his party captured both houses of Congress — DeLay was cementing a reputation for strong-arming lobbyists out of big bucks. (In his district people remember him as a good auctioneer who could get money out of anyone).
DeLay also was earning a name among his fellow 221 House Republicans as an enforcer of party discipline.
And he emerged as an unapologetic, unwavering crusader for right-wing causes.
When asked by a reporter in 1995 if there was any government regulation he would not oppose, DeLay reportedly answered: "None that I can think of."
Trouble on the home front
In 1996, when Fort Bend County Sheriff Milton Wright was campaigning for a first term as sheriff, he received a warning from someone in DeLay's camp, Wright said: Fire your campaign manager, Jacqueline Blankenship, or else. Wright's response: "Kiss My Ass."
Blankenship, a Republican activist who previously worked to elect DeLay, was married to a man with whom DeLay had had a falling-out over a business venture and, Wright said. DeLay pumped $70,000 into the campaign of Wright's opponent, financing a telephone poll and endorsing him in mailers and in television and radio ads.
The effort backfired. Wright won the race with 59 percent of the vote.
DeLay, who has insisted he threw his support behind Wright's opponent because he was the better candidate, hasn't stirred up the waters of any more local races.
"I think it cost him some points," Wright said.
What does Wright think of DeLay today?
He votes for him — and dismisses the 1996 incident as "politics."
Few people dispute that Tom DeLay will have to brace himself for the battle of his political career.
He faces yet another formal probe by his colleagues in the bipartisan House Ethics Committee and calls for him to set aside by now two congressmen from his own party. And now trouble percolates on the home front, among the very people that have put him into public office without fail since 1978.
Bev Carter, a Republican precinct chair and tough-talking grandma who publishes the weekly 65,000 circulation Fort Bend Southwest Star, turned against DeLay after the nasty 1994 sheriff's race and has mined the recent ethics scandals for column fodder. DeLay, she contends, is "the godfather of arrogance and greed."
"He may not be toast," Carter is fond of saying, "but he's brown."
Determined to see the defeat of a man she once liked, last November she did the unthinkable for a Republican. She voted for his opponent, Richard Morrison, a Democrat. And she urged her readers to do the same.
Patricia Perine Baig, a substitute teacher in District 22 who considers herself a Republican, said she's grown so embarrassed by the widening scandals that she recently took out a newspaper ad in a competing weekly urging people to attend an anti-DeLay demonstration.
"He's an embarrassment to his district, and he needs to do the honorable thing and resign," she said.
When DeLay showed up to give his speech at the NRA convention last week, about 100 protesters were waiting.
Ironically, since he engineered the state's 2003 redistricting plan, DeLay's own district is now slightly less Republican than it was before. And about 30 percent of his district is new, which means that during a time when support is most critical, DeLay must devote energy meeting a lot of fresh faces.
Richard Murray, a political science professor at the University of Houston, said he'd expect DeLay would win if an election were held today, with Morrison as the opponent.
"But it wouldn't be by much," he said.
Looking ahead to next year, and predicting the two parties this time will pour millions of dollars into the campaigns, he added: "It'll be a helluva race."
***....... Ms. Baig, who signed her advertisement with her maiden name, P. A. Perine, "A Texas Republican for Ethical Reform," at a post office box in neighboring Missouri City, said she often used her maiden name and was not trying to hide. .......*** ---- In DeLay's Home District, Rumblings of Discontent Surface By Ralph Blumenthal The New York Times Sunday 17 April 2005
http://www.majorityleader.gov/news.asp?FormMode=Detail&ID=421
WASHINGTON – House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) issued the following statement regarding House Republicans’ efforts to forge a compromise to get the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct up and running:
“I appreciate House Republicans’ continued efforts to search for a way to get the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct up and running. Republicans agree that the House of Representatives needs a functioning Committee on Standards of Official Conduct.
“I’ve sent letters to the committee asking to appear before the chairman and ranking member to discuss matters. And for more than a month I’ve said I hope for a fair process that will afford me the opportunity to get the facts out and set the record straight. I welcome the opportunity to address this with the committee.”
Do Dems live in glass houses ???
There's a mountian of stones the GOP needs to let fly.
Remember to hold your fire til ya see the whites of their eyes.........! When it comes to ethics, I consider his opponents a target rich environment....
Tom Delay....Proudly killing Rats as a lifetime enterprise!
The above is nothing but a hit piece.
The title is a come on for Delay's supporters. Makes it sound persevering and impressive (Embattled DeLay still is making a name for himself - Unapologetic, hasn't let trouble quiet him).
That is designed to attract them and get them to read the poison inside. I'm not a Texan, but I'm betting that the San Antonio Express orchestrated this....and is probably a liberal and/or Democrat media outlet.
Interesting that all the stuff they hate, we like.
The majority elected republicans, DEMCRATS are outside the mainstream.
The MSM voted for Kerry and kerry lost by MILLIONS, the MSM is outside the mainstream.
They attack Delay for the same reasons they attack bolton.
The Bureacrats are trying to save their own cushy jobs. Indecision is good for the democrat party. The UN corruption is good for the democrat party.
I hope delay keeps attacking.
If Ms. Baig is voting for a Democrat to espouse ethics... she's as dumb as a rock....IMHO Either that or she's a Rat claiming to be a Pub......to get some face time.
That's why FReepers love him.
Ditto.
Yes, it's a liberal slanted rag of a paper for the most part. Its only competitor, The San Antonio Light disappeared years ago. The Express is owned by one of the big Newspaper corps, but I forget which one. Probably Hearst.
I never read it. To me it's just a vehicle for the rotten city council to promote their liberal/socialist agenenda.
It's "Hammer" time. :)
That would be "reining" in judges.
It's perfectly understandable how someone would associate the word "reign" with Federal judges, but nonetheless I mourn the passing of literacy from our newspapers.
Here's an in your face pic for the Liberal
lyin' jerks trying to smear Delay!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
