Democrats finally have something they've wanted for a long time -- a House of Representatives not controlled by Tom DeLay. After the lawsuits, the ethics charges and the criminal indictments that seem to trail off into the distance, “The Hammer” has had to say “uncle.” But now, the Democrats must deal with the tyranny of a dream come true. Who will be the corruption poster boy?
There are some slivers of truth in DeLay's generally disingenuous claim that he's leaving Congress because he's become an easy target and he wanted to deny Democrats the shorthand demonization card. (He's leaving because he's got too many battles to fight and he might lose the election in November, period.) Still, next to Jack Abramoff, DeLay has become the face of the GOP corruption, and that paddle has worked well for Democrats over the last few months.
It's now up to Democratic brain trust to figure out how they get to November without a favored whipping boy at center stage. But as Tom DeLay rides off into the sunset, back to Sugarland, or some big K Street lobbying house, or maybe some state prison in the Great State of Texas, Democrats are required to do more that just snicker at his departure: There are lessons to be learned from the bug man from Sugarland.
While it may be proven in court that DeLay abused his power, there is little question that on important issues, he also knew how to use his power, and he spent a lot of time amassing it for that reason. The whole undercurrent of the last ten years of the Republican revolution in Congress was that liberals had used their power over previous generation --- starting with Brown v. Board of Education through Roe v. Wade up to and including the election of Bill Clinton -- to create a kind of country they did not like. And their goal in life was to use every tool at their disposal to reverse that and make so those changes permanent. And Tom DeLay was in the vanguard of that effort, and to the extent he succeeded, it was for three reasons: He knew what he believed in; he knew what he wanted to do in advancing those beliefs; he was utterly unapologetic, some say ruthless and criminal, about it.
None of the basics would have gotten him in trouble, if he were not also willing to break the rules over and over. And when the arrogance of success set in, it was only a matter of time before it would come crashing down.
Still, there were times when Democrats, even in their despair at having lost to him, had to marvel at his effectiveness. In the end, nothing would stop Team DeLay from getting what it wanted; the rules did not matter -- the three-hour vote on the Medicare prescription drug benefit in 2003 as the prime example.
But DeLay knew how to win, and that's something to steal from him as he exits. The world would be an altogether different place if Tom DeLay had never served in Congress. Just think of all the close votes that he won: Medicare changes by one vote; changes in Head Start by one; school voucher demonstration project in Washington, D.C., by one; passage of the Latin American free trade agreement, CAFTA, by two.
Former Congressman Chris Bell, the first Democratic casualty of the controversial mid-stream redistricting masterminded by Tom DeLay, was the person who filed the latest ethics complaint against DeLay for some of the same actions that led to the former majority leader's indictment in Texas. Bell, who is white, lost in a primary in 2004, after the DeLay put him in majority black district, making him an easy target for an African-American challenger to take him down. It worked.
But Bell sees a much longer arc to DeLay's powers and believes the GOP has lost its key operative to scandal: “For all intents and purposes, Mr. DeLay has set the agenda for the country at least for the last four years, and probably for longer than that,” Bell told me when DeLay stepped down as majority leader earlier this year.
There is a reasonable scenario that says that because of the problems of Tom DeLay, his minions and cohorts have heaped at its door, and the GOP will suffer terribly at the polls this fall. That has yet to play out; what is not in question is how much good he has done them over the years, because he never backed off. You'd think that if there ever was a time when he's want to be quiet, this was the week for it. Instead the indicted, disgraced, embattled congressman went on television and attacked Cynthia McKinney. He never backs off.
During the last few years on Capitol Hill as the GOP consolidated its power, there were always murmurings among some Democrats -- usually after a bitter defeat -- that they were getting beat because they didn't have a Newt Gingrich or a Bill Thomas or Dan Burton. Mostly what they didn't have was a Tom DeLay. Now the Republicans don't either, and that spells opportunity.
Terence Samuel is a political writer in Washington, D.C.