The Exterminator
How did Tom Delay become the most powerful man in Congress? By trying to squash his enemies—from the president to fellow Republicans who won’t follow the party line.
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If a vote count comes up short, DeLay will try to tinker with a bill to win converts. If he can’t please enough reluctant members, he starts pressuring them. Early on, DeLay acquired a reputation as a bully. During one vote, he yelled so loudly at Mark Souder of Indiana that another member had to gavel him quiet. But he’s also capable of a more refined approach. “He knows how to ask for a vote,” said Loeffler. “What you do is you explain that the vote is very important and that you need the person.” When I asked DeLay how he changes people’s mind, he said, “I tell them how I feel. I’m honest with them. I never ask a member to vote against his conscience or his district. Of course I also have to know him and his district well enough to know when somebody is trying to jerk me around.” Moderate Republicans complain that he uses the whip’s office for ideological purposes, a charge DeLay openly admits to. “I’m guilty,” he told The New Republic. “I admit it. I’m not just there to be whip. I’m there to advance an agenda. And I win.”
TO UNDERSTAND DELAY’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, it helps to consider where he comes from. His hometown of Sugar Land lies in Fort Bend County, twenty miles southwest of Houston. Driving there, I passed an eternal flatness, then a swath of luxury homes, another eternity of flatness, then another swath of houses, and so on. Over the past decade, Fort Bend has become the site of more master-planned communities than any county in the nation. DeLay represents the rise to political prominence of the American suburb.
Sugar Land started out as a colossal plantation. Imperial Sugar’s refinery still towers over town; at night, the company’s name glows steadily in blue, while the words “Pure Cane” blink on and off in red. Decades ago, Imperial sold off various properties to the state, and today signs on all routes leading out of town carry a warning: “Prison Area. Do Not Pick Up Hitchhikers.” At the same time, the county’s average household income is $66,956, compared with a national average of $45,780. Forty-five percent of the households consist of married couples with children, compared with the national average of 26 percent. Sometimes Sugar Land’s affluence gives people who live there a narrow view of the world. Three years ago, for example, DeLay declared there was no need to raise America’s minimum wage because “working families trying to get by on $4.25 an hour don’t really exist.”
Born in Laredo, DeLay grew up mostly in Venezuela, where his father worked as a drilling contractor. The family returned to Texas while he was in high school. After graduating from the University of Houston, DeLay bought Albo Pest Control. Unhappy encounters with government pesticide regulations led him to buy a how-to book on campaigns and run for the Texas Legislature in 1978. (DeLay hasn’t forgotten his experience at Albo: He has referred to the Environmental Protection Agency as the Gestapo and has tried to dismantle its enforcement powers.) The first Republican elected to the Legislature from the Fort Bend district this century, DeLay found himself in a House where Republicans had only 23 of 150 members. To get anything accomplished, he had to work with people who did not share his beliefs, and in those days he did so easily. His big issue was transportation, especially the deregulation of the trucking industry. DeLay’s avid free-market philosophy endeared him to the business community. “What Tom advocates is letting the market allocate goods and services,” said Jim Gustafson, a commercial real estate owner and longtime DeLay supporter. “I don’t mean to say government isn’t necessary. But you shouldn’t have politicians deciding everything.” Around this time, Houston attorney Corwin Teltschik and his wife, Carolyn, moved out to Fort Bend and became an integral part of his fundraising apparatus. Michael Stevens, a Houston developer, also became a backer. When DeLay decided to run for Congress in 1984, the aid of businessmen like these helped immensely. DeLay’s timing was impeccable: Ronald Reagan was reelected in a landslide that year, and he carried GOP candidates into office with him. Among those who rode in on his coattails was Tom DeLay.
NOTHING OF FORCE HAPPENS IN Washington unless there is a lot of money behind it. The means by which DeLay transformed himself from an unknown freshman into a heavyweight was his talent for raising funds. One of DeLay’s role models, he told me, was Tony Coelho, who had been the majority whip in the eighties. The California Democrat was perhaps the most assiduous fundraiser the Hill has ever seen; he so excelled at the money game that a book was written about his tactics (Honest Graft: Big Money and the American Political Process). Eventually, Coelho’s methods caught up with him, and he left Congress under a cloud.
Like Coelho, DeLay climbed to prominence by amassing a huge war chest and then doling it out to other members. In 1994 Gingrich was hoping to become Speaker (provided the Republicans won control of the House), and DeLay wanted to succeed him as whip. He started a political action committee called Americans for a Republican Majority (ARMPAC). Present at the earliest meetings were Gustafson, Teltschik, and Stevens. Enron’s CEO, Ken Lay, joined later. “We wanted to help Tom elect other Republicans,” said Teltschik, who was named treasurer of ARMPAC. “We wanted to target seats we thought could be won.” To raise enough money, they looked beyond DeLay’s usual sources. “Tom had raised most of his money in his own district,” said Stevens. “But there wasn’t enough there for this. We thought he should tap into downtown sources, into the entire city, state, and nation. And Ken Lay had a longer arm. He had national reach.” The businessmen were eager to vault DeLay into a leadership position because of his antipathy to governmental scrutiny of business. “Tom has very conservative beliefs about regulation,” said Lay. “He has a set of values that I think are important.”
ARMPAC became DeLay’s ladder to Republican leadership. During the 1994 election cycle, the PAC spent $227,601 on 430 candidates. Candidates who received $3,000 or more included Lindsey Graham of South Carolina (one of the House managers in the impeachment trial), Steve Largent of Oklahoma (the former pro football player who rebutted Clinton’s State of the Union address this year), and J. C. Watts, Jr., of Oklahoma (now chairman of the Republican Conference). ARMPAC also raised money that paid for political operatives to assist with campaigns and funded DeLay’s travel from state to state to campaign for GOP candidates.
That November, Republicans won a majority of House seats for the first time in forty years. Gingrich crafted the party’s message but didn’t spend nearly as much time in the trenches as DeLay. “Almost every race you might look at had Tom’s fingerprints on it,” said Bill Paxon, who was chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC). “He had political operatives in the districts, he went there personally, and he helped raise millions and millions of dollars for our candidates. He also raised money for the NRCC. There’s no doubt in my mind that next to the NRCC itself, the DeLay organization played the biggest role in that election.”
Once Republicans won the majority, DeLay’s fundraising became even more intense. Acquiring control over legislation allowed him to tap into Washington money, and he became famous for the pressure he put on lobbyists to back Republicans. He showed lobbyists a ledger tracking which ones were “friendly” (contributing heavily to Republicans) or “unfriendly” (contributing insufficiently to Republicans or supporting Democrats). Such tactics earned him his nickname, the Hammer. Exploiting a loophole in federal election law, ARMPAC registered a state branch in Virginia, which imposes no limit on corporate contributions to PACs. (R. J. Reynolds, for example, gave the Virginia branch $73,000.) DeLay was then able to give the money to state candidates in an effort to build a farm system of conservative officeholders. The money could also be used to run ads urging voters to support the Republican party and to pay some of ARMPAC’s expenses, thus freeing up more of the PAC’s money for federal candidates.
All this money amplified DeLay’s clout well beyond the traditional scope enjoyed by a congressman. In the last elections, DeLay concentrated his giving in fewer races; ARMPAC gave $379,477 to 113 Republicans. Most candidates received at least $1,000, but some received ten times that amount. ARMPAC enabled DeLay to become a power in his own right. In a California special election, he was emboldened to support Tom Bordonaro, a staunch conservative, when Gingrich, DeLay’s superior in the House GOP organization, was backing another Republican. (Bordonaro made it into the runoff ahead of Gingrich’s choice but lost to a Democrat.) Bucking Gingrich in that race was one of the early signals that DeLay was becoming more powerful than the Speaker.
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