From The Rutland Herald, 4/13/05:
http://www.rutlandherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050413/NEWS/504130304/1039
The decline and fall of Tom DeLay
By Marianne Means
WASHINGTON --
If you set yourself up as the nation's moral arbiter, you'd better
have clean hands yourself, because what goes around comes around.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is such a hypocritical Bible-thumper
he displays the Ten Commandments in his office, a symbolic rebuke to
the Supreme Court for refusing to encourage the commandments' display
in most public spaces.
Yet he has no empathy with the biblical Golden Rule, that basic
commonsense standard of moral behavior espoused by Matthew and Luke.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Judge not, that ye be not judged.
DeLay, 58, has been busily judging others ever since he arrived in
Congress.
Remember how shocked -- shocked! -- he was at President Clinton's
adulterous dalliance with Monica Lewinsky?
How he helped engineer the GOP takeover of the House in 1994 with a
promise to reform Congress and make us "proud" again?
A famously aggressive Republican fund-raiser and hard-line Christian
conservative, he has built his career on political intimidation and
partisan invective.
But lately the Texan has been going too far.
Resentment has been building against him as charges of ethical
violations accumulated.
But it was the wild-eyed threats he made while interjecting himself
into the Terri Schiavo case that really shook his public support.
After he found no legal backing for keeping the severely brain-damaged
Schiavo artificially alive, he raged against the judges with whom he
disagreed.
In a speech to a conservative conference last week, he attacked a
"judiciary run amok" and came perilously close to inciting violence
against the black-robed men and women who sit on the federal bench.
"The time will come for the men responsible for (the removal of a
feeding tube from Schiavo) to answer for their behavior," he
thundered.
The conference that he addressed enthusiastically expanded on his
sentiments, calling for impeachment of judges conservatives don't
like, threatening to cut courthouse budgets and stripping the federal
courts of the authority to hear cases involving abortion and the
Pledge of Allegiance.
This is dogmatic but frightening stuff.
Judge-bashing is the religious right's new fund-raising theme, Sen.
Edward Kennedy having pretty much over the decades worn out their
outrage.
There's still Sen. Hillary Clinton to target, but judges present a
fatter, meatier target.
And it's all leading up to an anticipated furious fight over the next
Supreme Court justice.
DeLay, however, has made a major mistake here.
With all this new attention, he has emerged from the political shadows
that have protected him.
Now DeLay is identified as a powerfully dangerous national figure to
be closely watched.
What we are seeing is not pretty.
There have always been suggestions that DeLay was so successful at
campaign fund-raising because he had no qualms about promising federal
favors in return.
DeLay has always denied that.
Most politicians hide behind the polite euphemism that all the donors
receive is access, not specific rewards.
But the ethics charges that now dog DeLay are stripping away the
artifice.
He has been rebuked more by the House Ethics Committee than any other
sitting member of Congress.
His response, typically, was to punish the committee by making it
harder to initiate an ethics probe and by replacing the
independent-minded chairman with a pro-DeLay stooge.
Last year the ethics panel complained about a DeLay golf fund-raiser
with energy company executives that smelled of special access, DeLay's
misuse of the Federal Aviation Administration to hunt down hiding
Democratic Texas legislators trying to block his redistricting plan
and DeLay's promise to a retiring GOP House member to endorse the
man's son for Congress if the member voted DeLay's way, which looked
just like a bribe.
All were clearly abuses of power.
In Texas, a prosecutor has indicted three DeLay associates for
improper fund-raising activity. In addition, the Justice Department,
the Interior Department, the IRS and two Senate committees are
investigating two former DeLay associates who may have defrauded
Indian tribes of $82 million.
One of them, Newsweek reports, says DeLay "knew everything."
Reporters have scrutinized three foreign trips DeLay took that were
paid for by lobbyists for foreign entities -- a possible violation of
House rules.
And while it is not illegal, it is unusual that DeLay paid his wife
and daughter a half million dollars, an extraordinarily generous sum,
over the past four years for unspecified campaign work.
DeLay, who has never worried about embarrassing others, denounced the
story as "a seedy attempt ... to embarrass me."
But sympathy may be hard to come by here.
So far, Republicans have been slow to call for his head, although
predictably Democrats already have the chopping block out.
But the fall of the powerful happens gradually, by inches.
Politically, DeLay is a dead man walking.
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