Tom DeLay is formally resigning as of June 9, 2006. Today, he gave his farwell address to Congress. You can read the full transcript
here, and watch the video
here. Predictably, he spent quite a long time extolling the virtues and performance of the Republican party while lashing out at liberalism:
In preparing for today, I found that it is customary in speeches such as these to reminisce about the good old days of political harmony and across-the-aisle camaraderie, and to lament the bitter, divisive partisan rancor that supposedly now weakens our democracy.
Well, I can't do that because partisanship, Mr. Speaker, properly understood, is not a symptom of democracy's weakness but of its health and its strength, especially from the perspective of a political conservative.
Liberalism, after all, whatever you may think of its merits, is a political philosophy and a proud one with a great tradition in this country, with a voracious appetite for growth.
In any place or any time on any issue, what does liberalism ever seek, Mr. Speaker? More -- more government, more taxation, more control over people's lives and decisions and wallets. If conservatives don't stand up to liberalism, no one will. And for a long time around here, almost no one did.
Indeed, the common lament over the recent rise in political partisanship is often nothing more than a veiled complaint instead about the recent rise of political conservatism.
I should add here that I do not begrudge liberals their nostalgia for the days of a timid, docile and permanent Republican minority.
The whole thing is quite entertaining. Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi writes this in an op-ed for The Hill:
Tomorrow, Tom DeLay officially resigns from the House of Representatives. His resignation brings to an end what the press has referred to as a "criminal enterprise" run out of the former majority leader's office.
Yet the widespread Republican culture of corruption goes deeper than one man and extends further than one office. Mr. DeLay's departure under an ethical and legal cloud fails to extinguish that broader corruption.
The corruption extends to legislation written by lobbyists that works for the few, not the many, such as a prescription-drug bill that benefits pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies rather than senior citizens and other Medicare beneficiaries and an energy bill that benefits Big Oil rather than consumers. Mr. DeLay (R-Texas) may be leaving office, but he leaves behind the cost of corruption.
Democrats are trying to address those costs of DeLay's corruption by targeting the gross human rights abuses in the Northern Mariana Islands:
House Democrats led by Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) introduced legislation today to extend key federal controls over a U.S. territory in the western Pacific, renewing an effort that was blocked for years by lobbyist Jack Abramoff and once-powerful Texas Republican Tom DeLay.
The bill aims to apply U.S. immigration law and basic labor protections, including the U.S. minimum wage, to the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), a U.S. territory 3,900 miles west of Hawaii. Human rights and labor investigators have found rampant abuses there over the years, notably the trafficking of women for a commercial sex trade and the exploitation of mostly female workers from poor Asian countries in a largely foreign-owned garment-manufacturing industry that uses the territory to turn out "Made in U.S.A." clothing exempt from U.S. tariffs and quotas.