TOM DELAY

The Congressman had been found to have committed a number of serious ethical violations and then was accused by a Texas District Attorney of his own party of money laundering and violating Texas campaign finance laws. His ethical and legal problems were heavily covered in the news when the Schiavo case developed of the woman whose brain had been starved for oxygen, for years in a persistent vegetative state, who had not wished to live hooked up to tubes. Some conservatives challenged the right of the husband and the hospital to follow the woman’s wishes even after the courts had consistently ruled that this had been the woman’s wish. Delay used this tragic case to divert attention from his own lapses. It did not work. Some months thereafter, he was forced to resign.

Those who did were ostracized by Delay (who was then the Republican Majority Leader) and some other leading Republicans. His extreme and sometimes illegal partisan tactics got him into criminal difficulty and he was a major part of the great Republican Scandal of 2005-2006. He then was convicted of criminal activity for his extreme and illegal political activities.

See Otis Singletary and Eddie Bernice Johnson for similar, earlier views.

DeLay had been forced to resign from his leadership position when he was criminally indicted. Months later after his former aids admitted criminal activity, he resigned from the Congress but claimed innocence. Then he was convicted. Always an extreme partisan, he was firm in his disdain for Democrats and bipartisanship or compromise of any kind.

Later, DeLay was convicted and sentenced to jail for money laundering and illegally spending and raising campaign funds. He was also reprimanded by the House Ethics Committee for unethical methods of fund raising for other earlier actions.

What was absurd about this statement is that tens of thousands of men were drafted during the Vietnam war unless they had connections or were not physically fit. The implication that minority youth who did volunteer were not “patriotic” like he was became an insult to many Americans. The Congressman was a “Chicken Hawk”—a politician very aggressive about sending our military into combat, yet who never served in the military themselves. Later, DeLay was convicted and sentenced to jail for money laundering and illegally spending and raising campaign funds. He was also reprimanded by the House Ethics Committee for unethical methods of fund raising for other earlier actions.