| I really can’t
do much better as a first response than what Earle
himself said last year: “Being called partisan
and vindictive by Tom DeLay is like being called ugly
by a frog.”
Flippancy, however, amusing as it may be, shouldn’t
replace a complete understanding of the astonishing
hypocrisy at work here. DeLay and the larger Republican
media machine have already begun characterizing the
prosecution of his financial misdeeds as obsessive
and groundless persecution by an extremist lefty.
There’s no defense like the truth, and Earle
has it in spades here. To begin with, this is a not
a public relations offensive of one hothead alleging
financial misdeeds to the press. Earle secured an
indictment of DeLay from a grand jury—not the
level of proof needed for a conviction, but it means
that a panel of Texas citizens was convinced by Earle’s
presentation of his case that a crime had likely been
committed.
The details of DeLay’s perfidy do seem rather
damning, and surprisingly straightforward. Texas campaign
law prohibits donations made by corporations to individual
political candidates. Earle alleges that DeLay and
his colleagues—James W. Ellis, who heads Americans
for a Republican Majority and John D. Colyandro, who
heads Texans for a Republican Majority, which are
DeLay’s national and state political committees,
respectively—took corporate donations to Texans
for a Republican Majority, and wrote a check from
the group’s bank account to the Republican National
State Elections Committee, a division of the Republican
National Committee. The check went to an RNC employee
named Terry Nelson, who James Ellis then contacted
with a list of seven individual Republican candidates
for state office in Texas, specifying how much of
the check was meant to be dispersed to each of the
seven. The Republican Committee thus became an extraordinarily
simple money laundering entity: prohibited from writing
checks directly to individual candidates, corporations
in Texas wrote a check to DeLay’s political
action committee and told them which candidate they
wanted the money to go to. DeLay’s cronies took
it from there, and figured that no one would ever
detect their corrupt two-step.
The political strategy feloniously funded by DeLay
was very successful. DeLay started up his committees
about five years ago, and nearly single-handedly altered
the face of Texas politics for time immemorial. He
did this by not only helping—through illegal
money-funneling—to elect scores of Republicans
to the Texas legislature (17 Republican candidates
who DeLay’s group gave money to won their elections),
but also by, once these state legislators had taken
control in 2003, helping them to redraw the congressional
districts of Texas to make it almost impossible for
Democrats to win any seats. In the first congressional
elections in Texas after the redistricting, Republicans
won five more seats than in the previous election.
So one can understand why Earle would feel a need
to prosecute DeLay, even when his success and reputation
as a Republican heavy-hitter at times makes him seem
invulnerable. DeLay has certainly run into ethical
problems before—he was officially reprimanded
by the House Ethics Committee three times in the last
year. But the well-oiled Republican machinery that
DeLay helped build has swept in to cover up any mess
every time. After the Ethics Committee criticized
him, DeLay’s close partner Dennis Hastert forcibly
changed the membership of the committee, removing
all the legislators who voted to admonish DeLay.
Similarly, last year House Republicans anticipated
that DeLay might face criminal indictment for his
leadership in the money-laundering scheme, and purged
the rule saying that party leaders had to step down
from their leadership positions if indicted on felony
charges. That move was seen as so blatant a protection
of their corrupt leader that public outcry and criticism
forced them to reinstate the rule, which resulted
in DeLay’s temporary relinquishment of his duties
as House Majority Leader upon announcement of the
indictment obtained by Earle.
And finally, DeLay’s personal criticism of
Earle is absolutely ludicrous. DeLay’s rigid
authoritarian leadership is legendary—he was
renowned for keeping a book recording donations to
his and other Republican campaigns in the anteroom
of his office, and if a lobbyist showed up from an
organization not in the book, they were summarily
shown out.
DeLay has also led an extremely successful reorganization
of lobbyists on a national level, partnered with Rick
Santorum in the Senate and Grover Norquist, a former
politico who is now a top lobbyist. The three headed
what Matthew Continetti, a writer for the conservative
magazine The Weekly Standard, called “the K
Street Project” in the New York Times recently.
Named after the street in Washington on which most
of the large lobbying firms are located, the plan
aimed to turn corporate America into a huge wallet
sitting in the Republican Party’s pocket, and
succeeded on an immense scale. The allegations of
funneling corporate money into the individual campaigns
of Texas politicians are directly consonant with a
campaign to harness the bank accounts of corporate
America that DeLay has been championing for the last
decade.
Ronnie Earle, on the other hand, can fairly be called
an idealist. His criticism of corporate corruption
of politics is well-documented. But he is also an
extremely even-handed prosecutor: since his election
in 1976, of the now-16 politicians that have been
indicted under his supervision, only four, counting
DeLay, were Republicans. His unbiased examinations
of corruption have even extended to himself—as
detailed in a profile by the Washington Post this
past weekend, after Earle realized that he had been
one day late in filing a report detailing donations
to his own campaign, he not only filed charges against
himself, but requested that the judge fine him rather
than excusing his extremely trivial misdeed.
And the indictment of DeLay can hardly be called
an overreach. Even in the last few weeks, Earle was
still expressing to the press that he doubted that
he would indict DeLay himself—while the investigation
of the committees continued apace, he just wasn’t
sure that the evidence regarding DeLay’s personal
involvement rose to a level that would warrant an
indictment. The about-face has led officials in Texas
to speculate that Earle secured cooperation from someone
with significant evidence about the scheme that specifically
implicated DeLay.
It is patently ridiculous for DeLay to get up on
his proverbial (and windbaggy) high horse and attempt
to condemn a scrupulously bipartisan Texas district
attorney as some partisan hack. Tom DeLay personifies
the modern concept of partisan hack. Darth Vader would
consider DeLay a little too partisan. Is it possible
that the Death Star actually can be destroyed? Tune
in to Texas, America, and find out.
Visit Dara Purvis on the web at www.DaraPurvis.com.
|
