The fall of ‘The Hammer’

What goes around comes around. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. When you keep pressing the line often enough and long enough as House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R-Texas) has been for the last few years, something’s bound to happen.

When Republicans took power from Democrats in 1994’s Congressional mid-term elections, the Contract with America was supposed to usher in a new era of government reform. Democrats had grown too comfortable with power, Republicans had argued, and it was time for a change.

In the Democrats’ case it took 70 years before complacency set in. With DeLay, Republicans have done it in a mere ten.

In a recent MSNBC interview, DeLay said that the charges brought against him by Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle were a partisan attempt to “criminalize politics.” In fact, Earle has prosecuted four times as many Democrats as Republicans.

If “politics” means circumventing Texas’ tough laws against corporate political contributions by forwarding the money to the Republican National Committee and receiving like-kind contributions in return, then perhaps politics should be a crime.

DeLay’s brand of politics, criminal or not, it is at the very least unethical. He has invited rebuke on the part of the House Ethics Committee numerous times.

To DeLay, “politics” means offering a lawmaker’s son political favors in exchange for a key vote while holding the same vote open on the House floor for longer than needed. “Politics” means asking the Federal Aviation Administration to track down Texas House Democrats who were leaving the state to protest his redistricting plan.

In 2003, DeLay engineered an effort to give Republicans more seats in Congress by intervening in his home state’s redistricting process. When the legislature there failed to draw up a redistricting plan on their own in 2001 after the 2000 census – every ten years as mandated by the Constitution – a federal court stepped in and drew their own lines. DeLay only intervened after 2002 after Republicans won majorities in both houses, enabling him to draw the most partisan lines possible. At the stroke of a pen, Democrats were given seven fewer seats in the House.

What is partisan here is not Earle’s prosecution, but DeLay’s actions. And while they may have been partisan, the moral, ethical and legal questions they raise should not be. For all he has done to test the boundaries of ethics and law in this country, a smiling mug shot should be the least of DeLay’s worries.

The day when politics once again becomes carrying out the business of the people instead of line-testing power plays cannot come too soon.

Omar Yacoubi may be reached at yacoubioa@vcu.edu