Wow. This doesn't happen every day.
WSJ:
By now you have surely read about House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's ethics troubles. Probably, too, you aren't entirely clear as to what those troubles are--something to do with questionable junkets, Indian casino money, funny business on the House Ethics Committee, stuff down in Texas. In Beltway-speak, what this means is that Mr. DeLay has an "odor": nothing too incriminating, nothing actually criminal, just an unsavory whiff that could have GOP loyalists reaching for the political Glade if it gets any worse.
The Beltway wisdom is right. Mr. DeLay does have odor issues. Increasingly, he smells just like the Beltway itself [...]
Taken separately, and on present evidence, none of the latest charges directly touch Mr. DeLay; at worst, they paint a picture of a man who makes enemies by playing political hardball and loses admirers by resorting to politics-as-usual.
The problem, rather, is that Mr. DeLay, who rode to power in 1994 on a wave of revulsion at the everyday ways of big government, has become the living exemplar of some of its worst habits. Mr. DeLay's ties to Mr. Abramoff might be innocent, in a strictly legal sense, but it strains credulity to believe that Mr. DeLay found nothing strange with being included in Mr. Abramoff's lavish junkets.
Nor does it seem very plausible that Mr. DeLay never considered the possibility that the mega-lucrative careers his former staffers Michael Scanlon and Mr. Buckham achieved after leaving his office had something to do with their perceived proximity to him. These people became rich as influence-peddlers in a government in which legislators like Mr. DeLay could make or break fortunes by tinkering with obscure rules and dispensing scads of money to this or that constituency. Rather than buck this system as he promised to do while in the minority, Mr. DeLay has become its undisputed and unapologetic master as Majority Leader.
Whether Mr. DeLay violated the small print of House Ethics or campaign-finance rules is thus largely beside the point. His real fault lies in betraying the broader set of principles that brought him into office, and which, if he continues as before, sooner or later will sweep him out.
The editorial tries to defend DeLay on the substance of the allegations and calls Earle a "partisan Democrat" (which is
not true -- among other Dems he targetted, he brought down a powerful Democratic Speaker of the Texas House), but the GOP establishment is clearly starting to turn on DeLay, afraid he threatens their hold on power. It's clear that beside the corruption, DeLay's sorry performance during the Schiavo affair didn't do him any favors, and may have, in fact, hastened his downfall.
The 2006 elections are still far away enough that getting rid of DeLay in the next few months would minimize the political damange. We've got Brooks and the WSJ editors on the "dump DeLay" bandwagon. Who's next? And will DeLay fight back?
Stay tuned.
(The DCCC has more on DeLay, and is also raising the heat on Ralph Reed, now running for Georgia lt. governor -- the good "Christian" whose company is all wrapped up in the DeLay corruption machine.)