Justice DeLayed

Or is it justice de-Nye’d?

One thing to say about Tom DeLay. He died politically the way he lived.

That is to say, he went down with a sneer and a lie on his lips. “During my time in Congress, I have always acted in an ethical manner within the rules of our body and the laws of our land,” he snarled in his letter of intent to relinquish altogether the position of House Majority Leader.

There’s a chance he believes that, in which case he’s psychotic. But more than likely, he wrote those words with the same haughty contempt for the intelligence of America that has always been his trademark. His career was devoted to the belief that people could be bamboozled, bribed, bought off, bullied and buggered.

When, in the future, historians ask what the hell happened to the GOP in the 90s that turned it into the fascistic and soulless monster that it is today, Tom DeLay, along with Newt Gingrich and a handful of crazed billionaires, will provide large pieces of the puzzle.

Tom DeLay will also be one of the biggest pieces in the story of how the GOP came to self-destruct.

America’s media, such as it is, won’t focus on DeLay so much. He’s narcissistic enough to think that this might somehow help the party, since he doubtlessly is convinced that the growing tide of disgust with the GOP is actually just a bunch of people who hate DeLay personally because he is strong and successful and popular.

Among the GOP elected officials, he was one of the most powerful. In a party where most of the office-holders tend to be puppets and hacks, he was one of the few who gave orders, rather than obeyed them. He defied, and eventually brought down, Newt Gingrich, and was responsible for the so-called “K Street Project.”

In fact, that might be the main thing that destroys the GOP for a generation. The K Street Project consisted of a type of strong-arming not seen in American politics since the bad old patronage days. In a nutshell, DeLay told lobbyists, “We are now the majority party, we control what happens in Congress. No bill gets to the floor without my say-so, and no amendment is allowed unless I approve it. Which means that you will have to make nice with us.”

So far, so good. In the system of legalized bribery that is Washington, that’s all above board. Disgraceful, but legal. But DeLay took it one step further. He told the lobbyists – one Jack Abramoff among them – that it wasn’t enough to be nice to the GOP. They were going to have to stop being nice to Democrats. Lobbyists that lobbied Democrats would find themselves cut out of the “give a thousand dollars and get back a hundred-thousand” conveyer belt of graft and sleaze that has replaced representative democracy.

This was hardball sleaze, the deliberate effort to make Congress a one-party system.

The trouble (from the GOP point of view and, of course, only in retrospect) is that without answerability, and with a mutual need to butter each over up, at the behest of major corporations and under pressure from DeLay, to do anything and everything to augment Republican power while cutting Democrats out of the loop, the GOP and the lobbyists started taking big steps over various legal and ethical lines.

Hard to believe there are actual laws regarding bribery and corruption still existing in Washington, but Republicans managed to find them and break them.

It was DeLay’s endless effort to wrangle ever more power and influence for the GOP that put the first big crack in the dam. He was behind the effort to gerrymander Texas between decennial reapportionments, in order to give the GOP six more safe seats. He managed to do that, but it brought attention to corporate funding of Texas assemblymen – and DeLay’s role in that – to the attention of America’s flaccid media.

It’s even harder to find and break bribery and corruption laws in Texas than it is in America, but DeLay managed it. That’s like getting a speeding ticket in Wyoming.

So DeLay is gone for good as Majority Leader, and America is the better for it.

The GOP is hoping that this might take some of the heat off of them. In American politics, there is a grand tradition that if you throw the head wolf to the sheep, that will protect the rest of the wolves.

In this case, it’s unlikely to work. Jack Abramoff is expected to sing like the proverbial canary in the wake of his plea-bargain, and it came to light the other day that the man has actually been wearing a wire in his dealings with the GOP, going back months. That is one of the reasons why “the Hammer” suddenly went silent.

It’s now believed that Abramoff may detail illegal contributions and bribes (as opposed to quite legal contribution and bribes). It is worth noting that the sudden revolt against DeLay in the GOP, and his decision to quit, came immediately after the news about Abramoff’s wire broke.

The beltway rumor mill says that Abramoff might bring about the indictment of between 20 and 60 Congress critters, nearly all of them Republican. The corporate media and the GOP have been trying to present it as a bipartisan issue, but they do it by trying to conflate legitimate bribes (excuse me, “donations”) with illegitimate bribes. Abramoff, whether he intended it or not, was sometimes within the bounds of undemanding American law regarding the bribing and influence peddling of public officials.

The only reason he kept it legit with Dems was because DeLay threatened to strip him of influence in the House, and a lobbyist without undue influence is just another clown in Guccis.

So it’s purely a Republican scandal, although had Abramoff been allowed to illegally bribe Dems, I’m sure he could have found some Democrats willing to bathe in the sleaze without too much trouble. The Democrats may not be as nearly unanimously corrupt as Republicans, but the existing system of legalized bribes and influence peddling pretty much mutes them as “the people’s party,” since the people don’t have the influence of soulless corporations.

A lot of the same people who pass out the bribes (legal and illegal) through lobbyists also own much of the corporate media, so expect them to pull their punches on the scandal, even though it’s already the biggest in the history of Congress. And a lot of Democrats will pull their punches, because their election campaign coffers are filled by the same people who worked through Abramoff.

The scandal will hurt the Republicans, and that’s a good thing. But it’s not enough. Unless the American people rise up and demand an end to the system of legalized bribes, and put campaign financing in the public domain, America will replace corrupt corporate whores with nothing more than other corrupt corporate whores.