Outside the Spectrum

    As a further meditation on the censures of Tom DeLay, I submit to you the following evidence.

    Conservatives, either tacitly or overtly, dismiss the censures against Tom DeLay as “no big deal.” Read this quote from the government’s own discussion of the matter:

Actual disciplinary actions by the full Senate or House have, in fact, been relatively rare. The Senate has adopted censure motions only eight times, censuring nine Senators, in its history, and has not expelled a Member of the Senate since the Civil War. (Fourteen Senators were expelled during the Civil War for disloyalty to the Union, and one other Senator expelled in 1797, also for disloyal conduct). The House has censured 22 Members (21 Representatives and one Delegate), and ``reprimanded'' seven others, while expelling only four of its Members in its history, three during the Civil War for disloyalty to the Union, and the most recent expulsion in 1980 after conviction for bribery in congressional office.

    So the House has only censured 22 members in its history. Tom DeLay was censured three times.

    The next time you hear conservatives parsing words about the wrongdoing of a member just look at the big picture. You can explain away any wrongdoing if you try hard enough: defense attorneys make a living of it. It is the balance of evidence that must be considered, not just the tortured explanations of one side of the argument.

    Conservatives continue their willful blindness in this matter, even when they admit that DeLay has too many ethical problems: “Fact of the matter is, when it comes to Washington politics, only Democrats can afford questionable or unethical behavior; Republicans must avoid any appearance of impropriety.” That is from redstaterant.com in an article that admits that DeLay has ethical problems while somehow asserting that Republicans are held to a higher standard.

    Oh, sure. I remember Newt Gingrich getting censured in 1997 for lying to a House investigative committee. He didn’t resign from the House until two years later, after another ethics scandal. I also remember democratic Speaker of the House Jim Wright immediately resigning from the House in 1989 after it was found that corporations that wanted to donate money to him used bulk purchases of his book to get around campaign finance limits.

    DeLay is not the target of a “witchhunt.” He’s a crook.

    I love to whip Tom DeLay because he is a crook that the republicans can’t separate themselves from. They try to separate themselves from bad politicians (a certain Florida politician comes to mind) but they ferociously defend politicians that are so central to their power structure that they can’t plausibly rebuke that person and not suffer political fallout. George W. Bush is one of the latter, and so is Tom DeLay.

    So they defend him in the face of overwhelming evidence. David Frum writes in the National Review Online that “Democrats execrate Tom DeLay, for the pungent reason that he beat them and beat them and beat them again. Who likes losing?”

    I laugh when I read that. It’s a variation of the “politicizing policy differences” talking point that has been used to defend Geroge H. W. Bush in the Iran-Contra Affair, Scooter Libby’s indictment, and now Tom DeLay’s indictment.

    It’s like it never occurred to Frum that people might hate Tom DeLay because he was an asshole, because he was rebuked by the Ethics Committee three times, because he was a crook.

    Belatedly, Frum realizes this, and admits that DeLay “no doubt deserves much of the blame” for the corruption in the House. But he minimizes the corruption by saying that it is merely “the cycles of politics,” mentioning the corruption of the “old Democratic majority.”

    I laugh at that, too. If DeLay had just covered up for some politicians on the take like the old Democratic majority then, yes, this would be just another cycle of corruption in the House. He did do that, but he went far, far beyond that. The corruption of “Duke” Cunningham isn’t what keeps most democrats up at night. What keeps them up at night is a majority leader who squashed inquiries into the manipulation of intelligence that sunk us into a disastrous war out of partisan loyalty. What keeps them up at night is the fact that Tom DeLay and his majority squashed inquiries into a blatantly illegal wiretapping program that has simply brought an end to the fourth amendment.

    Frum’s absurdity reaches heights rarely seen in print, with him maintaining that people will look back on the republican majority that took power in the House in 1994 as some kind of golden age. He predicts that one day, decades hence, our children will
see Tom DeLay’s face not in pixels but in sculpture, arranged with his sometime partner, sometime rival Newt Gingrich in the arcade alongside James Madison, John Calhoun, Thaddeus Stevens, Joe Cannon, Sam Rayburn and the other bygone powers of the House of Representatives. These leaders also had their faults. They too had their failures. But the United States is a just and generous nation, and those who write its history will tell the story in full: not only the tawdry chapters, but also the magnificent.

    I would laugh, but I am tired of laughing. So now Tom DeLay is going to be immortalized in granite next to James Madison. Indeed, why stop there, Frum? Why not put Tom DeLay’s face on Mount Rushmore and rename America “DeLayia?”

    Every human being has faults, Frum, but that doesn’t mean Charles Manson is the moral equivalent of James Madison. We are judged by the worst things we do in life. We will erect a monument to Richard Nixon before we immortalize his degenerate offspring.

    But I agree with him on one point: history will tell Tom DeLay’s story in full. History will tell of how he was expelled from Baylor for drinking and vandalism, ran a pest control company that was “at best a struggling operation,” faced liens three times from the IRS for not paying payroll and income taxes, settled twice with associates who said they were cheated by him, struggled with alcoholism in his early years in the House and earned the nickname “Hot Tub Tom” for his playboy lifestyle, and became estranged from much of his family.

    He did help balance the budget and enact welfare reform in the nineties, and he also was singularly responsible for exploding the budget over the last six years. He did enact spending restrictions, including cutting funding to the EPA, the VA, and dozens of other humanitarian branches of government.

    He was also at the head of Jack Abramoff’s client ring in the biggest pay-to-play system in living memory. He was also chock-full of bilious, ridiculous rhetoric that I cited yesterday. He was snide, vindictive, and partisan in the extreme, in the leadership of a party that has been a festering sore on the face of democracy for years.

    I wouldn’t call the sculptors just yet.

    Or maybe we should. Maybe we should put him in stone next to Newt Gingrich, Thomas Reed, Joseph Cannon, and Samuel Dickstein, to name a few more appropriate House members from history he might be compared to.