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

(Page 5 of 5)

The problem that the prosecution faces is that what TRMPAC did sounds more like politics as usual than money laundering, which is ordinarily associated with an ongoing criminal conspiracy involving illegal activity such as drug dealing or gambling. Earle’s case against DeLay rests on his belief that Texas law does not allow corporate contributions to campaigns, period—just to PACs for administrative purposes only. In this view, corporate funds could legally be used to pay for, say, TRMPAC’s rent and utilities but could not be used by a political campaign. Technically, a crime may have been committed, but will the jury care about the intricacies of the election code? Can Ronnie Earle make them care? When I put this question to DeGuerin, his response was “First we have to get a fair jury.” And he doesn’t mean in Austin.

TEXAS’S TWENTY-SECOND Congressional District is one of the more oddly shaped creations of DeLay’s redistricting plan, which is no accident, since it is his home district. It somewhat resembles a steam shovel: Fort Bend County is the cab, the southern portion of Harris County is the boom, and Highway 6 in Galveston County is the connection to La Marque, the shovel. Nick Lampson, on the other hand, thinks the district resembles the perspective one would have if one were looking straight down on the head of a man who is having a terrible time tying a bow tie. I’ll have to defer to Lampson here: The former Democratic congressman from Beaumont has gotten to know the district since he volunteered for the mission of sending Tom DeLay into retirement. Unfortunately for Lampson, he may have achieved his goal too soon.

Lampson was one of six Texas Democrats to lose his congressional seat in the redistricting battles of 2003. DeLay’s map obliterated Lampson’s old district, the Ninth, and moved it into Southwest Houston; it also created a new district, the Second, in Southeast Texas. Lampson gamely ran in the new Second, but the district was drawn to elect a Republican, which it did: Ted Poe, who won 55 percent of the vote. Lampson then moved into the Twenty-second and set his sights on DeLay. Instantly, this race became the Democrats’ top priority nationwide. Even before the uncontested Democratic primary, Lampson had raised more than $2.3 million. When I saw him, shortly after the primary, in his Clear Lake campaign headquarters, he was buoyed by the news that Congressional Quarterly had just changed its estimate of the race from “leans Republican” to “toss-up.” But when DeLay announced that he would give up his seat in Congress and his position on the November ballot, Lampson went from even money to underdog. He now faces a race against a yet-to-be-determined (but sure-to-be-well-known) Republican, who has no ethical baggage.

Lampson is the kind of person Texas used to send to Congress back in the Johnson-Rayburn days: a slightly left-of-center Democrat whose background is courthouse politics. He was Jefferson County tax assessor-collector for eighteen years before winning his congressional seat, in 1996. He served four terms, tending mainly to district concerns (air pollution, trade policies that could hurt labor, and the Johnson Space Center), before redistricting sent him home. Now he was going door-to-door in subdivisions. “I’ve been in the neighborhoods,” he said. “I went to New Territory [in Sugar Land] Saturday, door knocking. I visited thirteen-hundred, fourteen-hundred homes. I’ll be in the neighborhoods this summer. Buy a pair of shorts, be where the people are.” He ended with a line that he won’t be using anymore: “They deserve to have a congressman who makes headlines for the right reason.”

Although Lampson never represented Fort Bend, he does have roots here. His grandparents settled in Stafford, just outside the Harris County line. “I learned about work ethic pulling a cotton sack,” he told me. “I rode horses in the fields here. I hunted here. I’m going to carry Fort Bend County.” He comes across as earnest but not self-important, a persona that would have made him exactly the right contrast to DeLay, who famously said, when asked by a restaurant manager in the Smithsonian to stop smoking a cigar because the restaurant was on property owned by the federal government, “I am the federal government.”

Can Lampson win the district? Before DeLay left the race, I would have said yes. Two years ago, DeLay got only 55 percent of the vote against an unknown, unfunded Democrat. Nothing good, and a lot of bad, had happened to him since that election. Lampson is neither unknown nor unfunded. But the fundamentals change without DeLay in the race. The anti-DeLay Republican vote that was the equalizer in this 57 to 60 percent Republican district has vanished. Now the Republican nominee will be the default choice for most disaffected DeLay voters.

A special election to fill the rest of DeLay’s term, which expires in January, would have helped Lampson. The Republican vote would have split among several candidates, allowing Lampson to win—which is why Governor Perry chose to leave the seat vacant for now. The GOP nominee on the November ballot will be chosen by the method Eric Thode explained to DeLay’s staffer: The county chairs of the district’s four counties, along with one precinct chair from each county, will choose the nominee. If this were an ordinary Republican primary, the front-runners would be David Wallace, the mayor of Sugar Land, and Robert Eckels, a former state legislator who is now county judge of Harris County. But only eight votes matter, so anything could happen. For example, there has already been some discussion of the three non-Houston counties ganging up on the big city. Thode told me on the night DeLay quit that he expected the county chairs to meet fairly soon so that the chosen candidate could start campaigning.

Is there a scenario for a Lampson victory? His best hope now is that Steve Stockman, the Republican whom Lampson defeated ten years ago in his old upper Gulf Coast district, sticks with his previous plan to run as an independent. (He’ll need just five hundred signatures on a petition to qualify for the ballot.) Then the Republican vote could still split, allowing Lampson to win with less than 50 percent of the vote. It’s a long shot. But even if he loses, Lampson will have won: He drove the Hammer into retirement.

LAST JUNE, AROUND four hundred people showed up for a lunchtime tribute to Tom DeLay at Houston’s Westin Galleria hotel. “Tom, we’re proud to be here for you today,” said county judge Eckels. Mayor Bill White, a Democrat, praised DeLay via videotape. The Houston Chronicle quoted Ed Young, the pastor of Second Baptist Church, in his own taped tribute describing DeLay as “a man who stands straight and tall for God and for good.”

This is the alternative universe in which DeLay was and is regarded as a hero and where the cartoon character is a distant speck in the firmament. Here DeLay is respected and admired in the way Democrats once talked about LBJ—as a figure whose flaws can be forgiven because he has such an uncanny aptitude for politics. (“It’s in his bones,” GOP congressman Kenny Marchant, of Coppell, says of DeLay.) The inhabitants of this alternate universe range from Republican activists who see DeLay as a victim of partisan politics to GOP members of Congress from Texas whose careers he has nurtured to Houston business leaders who dread a future that does not include Tom DeLay.

When DeLay ceased to be majority leader, Texas found itself without a member of the House leadership for one of the rare times since the thirties. Does this matter? You bet it does. Two years ago, DeLay won for Texans—for the first time since the mid-eighties—the right to deduct sales taxes on their income tax returns. (That provision is set to expire soon; get ready to pay more taxes.) Also in 2004, DeLay held up the transportation funding bill to get more money for Texas. He won an increase from 86 cents of every dollar in federal gasoline taxes paid to 92 cents; no one else could have done it. Work has begun on Interstate 69, whose economic benefits will be felt from the Rio Grande to deep East Texas. The Greater Houston Partnership says he is “solely responsible” for blocking a $1.1 billion cut in funding for NASA in 2004. That represents a lot of jobs. And there’s more: nine-figure funding for the Port of Houston and eight-figure funding for medical research and eight-figure funding for area colleges and universities, all since 2000. One reason Texas fared so well is that DeLay, as majority leader, was able to make sure that Texas Republicans got on the committees that matter to the state. Four, plus DeLay, currently sit on Appropriations. Who will nurture the careers of the next generation?

Make no mistake about it: Texas will suffer from the departure of Tom DeLay. But America won’t. His legacy includes many actions that have been bad for the country and bad for the political system. He was a man given to excess. He was that way in the Texas House, when his excess was partying. He was that way as overseer of the K Street Project, when his excess was doing favors for lobbyists. He was that way during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, when many Republicans and most Democrats wanted to put the unseemly episode behind them with a censure of Bill Clinton but DeLay insisted on putting the country through the ordeal of impeachment, saying words that may come back to haunt him: “No man is above the law, and no man is below the law.” He was that way when, in order to increase his Republican majority in Congress, he resorted to a midcensus redistricting plan that will surely be a precedent in any state where majority control changes hands. He was that way when he disagreed with judges’ decisions, such as in the Terri Schiavo case, when his excess was, again, to hint at impeachment. He was that way when he wanted to elect a Republican majority in the Texas House in 2002 and his excess was to run afoul of campaign finance laws. The machinations with TRMPAC that led to his indictments were totally unnecessary; a solid Republican majority in the House had already been ensured by the map drawn in 2001 by the GOP-dominated Legislative Redistricting Board.

Call it lack of self-restraint. Call it delusions of grandeur. Call it an unslakable thirst for power. No political system can allow it to rage unchecked. More than the Democrats, more than the media, more than any ethics committee, excess is what brought Tom DeLay down. And it could bring him down further still.

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