(A Cautionary Tale)
As we all know,
Tom Delay is a bug exterminator driven to politics by his fury over environmental rules (he once called the EPA the Gestapo of government).
But what, exactly, has this meant (is this meaning) to the United States?
DeLay was "driven to politics" by his inability to see beyond his own immediate needs to the good of society as a whole--or to the needs of future generations. He could kill those bugs dead, if only the government would get off his back. Who cares what might happen later, as a result of the insecticide. His business was killing bugs, and the EPA was making it harder for him to do so.
DeLay's attitude reflects that of many politicians, now and in the past, but in him it goes to extremes never before seen. This is a man so narrowly focused that the concept of "collateral damage" is not only considered irrelevant but beneath contempt. "Take care of the now and the future will take care of itself." That might as well be DeLay's mantra.
Today, though he has been hobbled by admonitions over ethical lapses by the House of Representatives Ethics Committee and money-laundering indictments, DeLay continues to endanger American (and especially Texan) legal structures and processes.
Though we may feel smug that the Majority Leader has been brought down, he is still an extremely dangerous man, one who is continuing to damage our society. He will fight for his own survival, no matter the destruction he brings upon us all. Like Samson, he will bring down the whole structure rather than concede anything at all. Unlike Al Gore, who decided (mistakenly, in my opinion) that it was best for the nation if he gave up his own ambition, DeLay has no interest in the greater good for Americans.
Before you get too comfortable thinking that DeLay's chickens have come home to roost, remember the attack he made (an attack that succeeded) on the tradition of redistricting once a decade following the census. It was crazy. Most of us watched with mouths open, unbelieving:
But the GOP effort produced some of the most spectacular political fireworks in the state's recent history, with Democratic state legislators fleeing Texas en masse last year to deprive Republican leaders of a quorum to vote on the plan.
At one point, DeLay asked the Federal Aviation Administration to help find a plane that Republicans thought was carrying Democratic legislators -- a move that led the House ethics committee on Oct. 6 to admonish DeLay for taking "official action on the basis of the partisan affiliation . . . of the individuals involved."
We had to shake our heads, hardly believing this was happening in America.
But it was. And similarly arrogant and ill-thought actions continue on the part of DeLay. Wounded he may be... but dangerous he remains.
Think about what he is doing to our system of grand juries and public prosecutors with his attack ads against Ronnie Earle, the man who brought the money-laundering charges against him:
The commercial will have a saturation buy in Austin and will run at times on the Fox News Network, said fund spokesman Todd Schorle. He said the fund is not trying to affect the potential jury pool in DeLay's case. He declined to say how the commercials were financed.
Question: If the ad is not meant to "affect the potential jury pool," then just what
is its purpose?
By DeLay's action (and it is his, though the ads "come" from elsewhere), the whole position of our prosecutors has changed, brought into the arena of the worst type of politics. Even if Earle's pursuit of DeLay was politically motivated (and I don't believe it was), this response is completely uncalled for. It is destructive only. The thing to do, especially if one believes oneself to be innocent, is to fight this battle in the courts, not on television. The precedent that DeLay has set may lead to a future John Gotti making a media buy to contaminate the jury pool before his trial. What DeLay has done may well prove monumentally destructive to our entire judicial system.
It has been fun, yes, to watch the circus in Texas the last few days over the judge(s) in the DeLay case. But this, too, is potentially destructive--more so in Texas, but other states do elect judges, too. DeLay managed to get Judge Bob Perkins removed from the case, not because he is biased (all accounts are that he is fair) but because he had given money only to Democrats (as a politician, Perkins has to donate to his fellow Democrats). Earle, then, got judge B.B. Schraub (also considered to be a fair judge) to withdraw from the case because he, too (of course) had given only to candidates of his own (Republican) party. Laylan Copelin, writing in The Statesman describes what happened then:
The judicial carousel in U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay's conspiracy case almost spun out of control Thursday as the search for a judge beyond the hint of any political taint reached the chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court.
Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson, a Republican, named Pat Priest, a retired Democratic judge from his hometown of San Antonio, to hear the case -- but not before Jefferson's own multiple ties to DeLay's political operation were questioned. ...
For three days, Earle and DeGuerin had been playing a kind of judicial roulette that exposed the challenges of trying a highly political case in a state where all judges run in political elections and have close ties to other candidates.
First, DeGuerin won a hearing Tuesday to get state District Judge Bob Perkins, an Austin Democrat, removed from the case because he gave money to Democratic candidates and causes, particularly the Internet-based organization MoveOn.org. Taking a page from that playbook, Earle on Thursday filed a motion that forced regional presiding Judge B.B. Schraub, a Seguin Republican who was supposed to name Perkins' replacement, to withdraw because of his political donations to Republicans.
That playbook is now going to be used by all sorts of defendants and (in turn) by prosecutors. Politics and the law have been forced together in a way that no one, not even a few short years ago, ever imagined. In some ways, this is worse that the feared "judicial activism" pointed to by both the left and the right, for it leaves no way out--assuming, as it does, that no one with a political point of view can be trusted to be "fair." Through this, our entire system of justice is attacked; the concept of "blind justice" is completely ruled out. "Blind justice" may be a rarity, but it is something we must believe in, if our system is going to work at all. DeLay has reduced the possibility of continued belief.
DeLay's destructive "march to the sea" is not over. Perhaps he is even more dangerous now, though he has been removed (temporarily, at least) from his position of House Majority Leader. He is angry and scared, and knows no boundaries, ethical or otherwise.
Let's temper our glee over his troubles. He is a dangerous madman who could still harm us all.