Poor Tom DeLay

Today’s quote from Tom DeLay, in reference to the publicity surrounding his myriad "alleged" ethics violations:

"It's nothing but a bunch of leftist organizations that have a public strategy to demonize me..."

This, from a leader of the party whose National Committee publicly declared their intent to "Daschle-ize" new Senate minority leader Harry Reid. You remember how the RNC handled Tom Daschle, don’t you? With a series of well-orchestrated attacks and smears, they mercilessly pummeled him into becoming the first Senate leader in 52 years to lose his reelection bid.

I must admit, I’m a little muddled about the ethics violations of which DeLay is accused. Allegations of gift-taking, influence-buying, sharing a bed with big corporate and foreign interests…while these things are illegal, and should be, they smack to me of political business-as-usual. I remember being a young voter in the state of Illinois, where everyone took it for granted that most of the politicians were corrupt, and it didn’t really matter. Under the assumption that corrupt politics were the only way anything ever got done. The behind the scenes machinations of the Chicago Democrats were given blanket pardon under the slogan that Chicago was "The City That Works."

So I think the powers who are out to "get" Tom DeLay are barking up the wrong tree when they start checking off a list of his political no-nos. The American people are just going to yawn and say, "So what?" It doesn’t matter that the things he does are clearly unethical and clearly against the law. They are clearly boring. They are NOT a nice juicy sex scandal that the public can really sink their teeth into. If it doesn’t constitute hiding under beds and exploiting intimate details of private lives with a hypocritical cry of moral indignation, the electorate is not interested. While the democrats were shouting into the wind about Tom DeLay’s political corruption, DeLay was making political hay by jumping into the middle of the Terry Shiavo battle. Which strategy netted more on-camera time for the cause?

More concerning to me is DeLay’s virtual declaration of war on "an arrogant, out-of-control, unaccountable judiciary that thumbed their nose at Congress and the president." What exactly makes them out of control…the fact that they demonstrated they had not yet been stocked with sufficient Bush Administration appointees to come to heel on a "right to life" case with which Congress and the President had absolutely no business, or legal right, to interfere?  Apparently, the GOP wants the courts completely under their control. Democrats approved over 200 of the administration’s first-term nominees, while blocking only ten of the worst. Why has the blocking of ten judicial nominees by the minority party become such an issue that it has caused unprecedented action by the majority party? A vendetta against the Senate Minority Leader that cost him his job; the majority leader of the House making not-so-veiled threats against the judiciary; and Senate Republicans considering the "nuclear option" of taking away the minority party’s right to exert last-ditch control on a runaway senate with the filibuster.

One has to wonder, to what degree is the Republican Party at large invested in targeting the judicial system for a wholesale takeover by conservative interests? And why? Are we expected to believe that the GOP has become so drunk with power that they would fly into such a large-scale rage at such a small-scale defeat? Some of us may swallow that…but the rest of us are left to wonder what is really at stake here. What is so important about these last ten judicial nominations that the party would go to such lengths to assure their confirmation? And why are the American people NOT asking these questions?

If Tom DeLay goes down, it shouldn’t be for some amorphous political double-dealings for which the general population is too apathetic to hold him accountable. It should be for his "arrogant, out-of-control, unaccountable" attitude toward a constitutionally ordained branch of our government, which was created as part of the checks and balances built into our system by our wise founding fathers; not to be at the beck and call of the Executive and Legislative branches, but to serve as a balance against that power, real or assumed. And if DeLay's attitude is shared by the bulk of the Republican party, they should all go down with him.