Without DeLay

The political landscape changes in an instant, and when it does, careers can come to an end. So it happened with tom delay, whose lack of self-restraint and self-awareness made him the architect of his own undoing.

by Paul Burka

May 2006

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Now DeLay was following in Coelho’s footsteps, bringing the lobby to heel with such enthusiasm that he acquired his now-famous nickname—which, DeLay told me, is “kind of cute. I’m just a very gentle guy.” Keeping “a very close eye on the money” meant tallying the contributions of the four hundred largest PACs to members of each party and classifying every PAC as friendly or unfriendly. “There’s been a Democratic mind-set in this town for forty years,” DeLay told me. “Lobbyists were Democrats because they had to be Democrats to succeed. Do you think they want us to be in power? They’re telling their organizations, ‘We’d better hedge our bets. Democrats might take back the House.’”

There were two major differences in the way Coelho raised money for the Democrats and the way DeLay raised money for the Republicans. In Coelho’s era, lobbyists remained supplicants. DeLay embraced them as partners; they participated in the writing of legislation behind closed doors. The other difference had to do with style. Coelho stayed out of the limelight. His threats were never explicit. He never bragged about his hits. He was Vito Corleone in The Godfather, making PACs an offer they couldn’t refuse. DeLay was Al Capone in The Untouchables, saying of Elliot Ness: “I want him dead!” And he wanted everybody to know who was responsible.

OF ALL THE QUESTIONS about Tom DeLay, the most puzzling is, Why did he thumb his nose at proprieties that were meant to ensure respect for the institution he led when he had everything to lose and so little to gain? Well, maybe not so little. There was the much-talked-about golfing trip to Scotland in June 2000, when Jack Abramoff, the disgraced lobbyist who pleaded guilty in January to charges of fraud, tax evasion, and conspiracy to bribe public officials, picked up the $14,001 first-class airfare for DeLay and his wife, Christine—a clear violation of House rules, which prohibit a registered lobbyist from paying a member’s travel expenses and limit the value of any gift to $100. DeLay’s office has said that he thought the payment came from the nonprofit National Center for Public Policy Research. That sounds innocent enough, except that Abramoff was on the board of the NCPPR, and he steered a total of more than $1 million in contributions from the Choctaw Indians in Mississippi, a client interested in gaming, to the organization. Some of the earliest Choctaw contributions helped pay for DeLay’s golf trip to Scotland. The president of the NCPPR testified before a Senate committee that Abramoff asked that she send $450,000 of the Choctaw contribution to his nonprofit Capital Athletic Foundation, an operation that, according to the Washington Post, spent less than one percent of its revenue on its stated purpose, youth athletics. Instead, Abramoff used the contributions to his foundation for his own purposes—to help fund a Jewish school he founded, to pay for another golf trip to Scotland, and to make a $25,000 contribution to the DeLay Foundation for Kids.

The details of DeLay’s relationship with Abramoff are breathtaking in their brazenness. Take the short (1996 to 2001) history of the U.S. Family Network, a nonprofit political advocacy organization that became a personal playpen for several DeLay associates. The Post has detailed how the USFN didn’t have to scramble to raise funds; most of its $3.02 million in contributions came from Abramoff clients: $1 million reportedly from Russian oil executives by way of a London law firm, $650,000 from a textile magnate in the Northern Marianas Islands, and at least $250,000 from the poor Choctaws. And how did the USFN promote family values? It did quite nicely by the Buckham family—Edwin, DeLay’s former chief of staff and the organizer of the USFN, and Wendy, his wife—who extracted more than $1 million from the nonprofit through a monthly retainer of at least $10,000 and commissions on donations, the Post reported. And the DeLay family too: Christine DeLay received three years of monthly payments of at least $3,200 from the Buckhams’ consulting firm for compiling a list of the favorite charities of members of Congress.

The dots connect: Abramoff to the USFN to DeLay and his associates. A consulting firm set up by Tony Rudy, a DeLay staffer, got $86,000. The USFN paid for radio ads against Democrats, for a town house near the Capitol (which became the headquarters for the nonprofit as well as for the Buckhams’ consulting firm and DeLay’s ARMPAC), for a vase worth $20,000 and art worth $62,000, and for more than $250,000 in travel expenses. The whole scheme looks like a ruse in which Abramoff directed his clients to contribute money to various nonprofits in order to lavish favors on DeLay and other lawmakers. (In late March, Rudy became the third DeLay associate to plead guilty to federal corruption and fraud charges; the other two are Michael Scanlon, a former press aide who went to work for Abramoff, and, of course, Abramoff himself.)

Time for the obligatory disclaimer: There is no clear indication that any of the USFN’s expenditures were illegal or that DeLay knew about any of the above payments (other than those to his wife, which were within House rules). Just because his associates have been charged with crimes doesn’t mean that DeLay had knowledge of their activities. Indeed, the Post, citing court papers, has reported that Abramoff and Rudy solicited donors to the Capital Athletic Foundation by telling them—“falsely”—that DeLay wanted them to contribute. DeLay wouldn’t be the first politician who was hurt more by his friends than by his enemies.

The crucial question in these situations is whether DeLay did anything to help Abramoff’s clients. On one occasion, DeLay put a statement in the Congressional Record praising the chief of the Choctaws for “hiring quality lobbyists.” Smarmy, but no big deal. But a bigger deal was a letter DeLay and other House GOP leaders—including Speaker Dennis Hastert and majority whip Roy Blunt—wrote to Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton in 2003 opposing an Indian casino that might compete with one operated by the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, another Abramoff client. A lobbyist for the tribe whose casino the leadership had opposed told the Post, “It was incredibly unusual for that group of people, who do not normally weigh in on Indian issues, to express such a strong opinion about a particular project not in any of their home states.” (Another obligatory disclaimer: The line between influence peddling, which is plain old politics, and corruption, which is not, can be difficult to discern. A DeLay spokesman told the Post, “The majority leader has been consistent in his opposition to the expansion of gambling.”)

The harm to DeLay’s reputation done by the Abramoff investigation came on top of a long history of ethical infractions. While some are weightier than others, the overall impression created by DeLay’s dealings is one of a public official who repeatedly and knowingly tested the limits of the allowable. The first such occasion arose in 1997, when he received a letter from the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, better known as the Ethics Committee. The letter admonished him for creating the impression among potential donors that political contributions would bear fruit in “official action or access.” (A second admonition warned against helping his brother Randy get lobby clients.)

The following year, DeLay tried to block a major trade association, the Electronics Industry Alliance (EIA), from hiring a former Democratic congressman, Dave McCurdy, as its president. When the EIA refused to cut McCurdy loose, DeLay pulled an “I want him dead!” maneuver, removing from the House calendar a major bill backed by the EIA: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which protected intellectual property on the Internet from theft in cyberspace. It was a good, necessary, noncontroversial bill, and it needed only a final House vote and the president’s signature to become law. Still, the EIA would not back down, and neither would DeLay. When the posturing ended, the EIA hired two GOP lobbyists—a prominent House staffer and Bob Walker, DeLay’s onetime adversary for whip—and McCurdy stayed on. Only then did DeLay allow the bill to pass the House.

A year later, out of the blue, the Ethics Committee admonished DeLay over the EIA incident. No complaint had been filed; no official investigation had been announced. On its own initiative, the bipartisan panel of four Republicans and four Democrats had voted unanimously to cite DeLay for his actions toward McCurdy and the EIA. The committee also wrote every member of the House, reminding them that they were prohibited “from taking or withholding any official action on the basis of partisan affiliation.”

In 2003 DeLay was in the ethics spotlight again. By that time he was majority leader, and he was trying to pass the president’s contentious Medicare prescription drug bill. DeLay brought it to the floor knowing he didn’t have the votes to pass it. The House voted it down, but he kept the tally open for almost three hours after the normal fifteen minutes of voting plus a two-minute grace period while he tried to persuade Republican members to change their votes. Sometime in the wee hours, the bill passed by a slender margin. The next day, retiring representative Nick Smith, of Michigan, posted on his Web site that “bribes and special deals were offered to convince members to vote yes.” He claimed that he had been offered a $100,000 campaign contribution from the National Republican Congressional Committee for his son, who was running to succeed him, in exchange for his vote. Smith later said that “no House member” had made the offer. The Ethics Committee found that DeLay had offered to endorse the younger Smith in exchange for the father’s vote. This drew another admonishment: “It is improper for a Member to offer or link support for the personal interests of another Member as part of a quid pro quo to achieve a legislative goal.”

Compared with some of DeLay’s other transgressions, these two incidents fall in the “not particularly serious” category. They seem like politics as usual for a legislative leader. In the EIA case, no lasting harm was done. The bill passed, as it had been destined to do all along. As for the “bribery” incident, if all DeLay did was offer to endorse Smith’s son in return for a vote, well, I’m shocked, just shocked, that politics is being practiced in Congress.

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