At the end of the 1930s’ gangster movie “Little Caesar” Edward G. Robinson’s gangster character utters the immortal words as he stares death in the face: “Is this the end of Rico?”
Today, the same question lingers not necessarily about Tom DeLay’s Congressional career — he announced yesterday that he won’t run for re-election after all — but whether DeLay is going to assume the role he suggests he will: of someone who will work to get a Republican from his district elected, toil to keep the Republican majority and strive to continue to solidify ties between religious groups, the GOP political apparatus and the government. Will it be the Revenge Of The Bugman at the polls in November after all….or is he about to vanish totally from the scene – perhaps eventually into a prison cell?
The news broke quickly yesterday. According to MSNBC‘s newscasts yesterday, Hardball’s Chris Mathews was the first one out of the gate with the news that the man who has been a key player in making America’s polarized politics polarized was not going to run. Mathews had talked to DeLay and it was clear: “the Hammer” was about to fall. Time Magazine was about to break the story.
The New York Times:
Representative Tom DeLay, the relentless Texan who helped lead House Republicans to power but became ensnared in a corruption scandal, has decided to leave Congress, House officials said Monday night.
Mr. DeLay, who abandoned his efforts to hold onto his position as majority leader earlier this year after the indictment of the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, a former ally, was seeking re-election as vindication. But he told selected colleagues that, facing the possibility of defeat, he had decided not to try to hold on to his House seat.
“He just decided that the numbers and the whole political climate were against him and that it was time to step aside,” said one Congressional official with knowledge of Mr. DeLay’s plans. The official did not want to be identified because Mr. DeLay’s formal announcement was scheduled for Tuesday in Houston.
His decision was first reported Monday by MSNBC and by Time magazine on its Web site, which posted an interview with Mr. DeLay, as did The Galveston County Daily News. “I’m very much at peace with it,” Mr. DeLay told Time of his decision.
Mr. Delay, who is serving his 11th term in Congress, told the Galveston paper he planned to step down from his seat by late May or June.
Here’s a timeline of DeLay’s ethical problems.
“Is this the end of Rico?” DeLay’s Time Magazine interview suggests it isn’t:
“I’m a realist. I’ve been around awhile. I can evaluate political situations,” DeLay told TIME at his kitchen table in Sugar Land, a former sugar plantation in suburban Houston. Bluebonnets are blooming along the highways. “I feel that I could have won the race. I just felt like I didn’t want to risk the seat and that I can do more on the outside of the House than I can on the inside right now. I want to continue to fight for the conservative cause. I want to continue to work for a Republican majority.”
So he’s saying he’ll still be out there politicking. And is he contrite? Contrite, conshmite…he still insists he did nothing wrong:
Asked if he had done anything illegal or immoral in public office, DeLay replied curtly, “No.” Asked if he’d done anything immoral, he said with a laugh, “We’re all sinners.” Asked what he would do differently, he said, “Nothing.” He denied having failed to adequately supervise members of his staff, even though two of his former aides have pleaded guilty to committing crimes while on his staff. “Two people violated my trust over 21 years,” he said. “I guarantee you if other offices were under the scrutiny I’ve been under in the last 10 years, with the Democrat Party announcing that they’re going to destroy me, destroy my reputation, and that’s how they’re going to get rid of me, I guarantee you you’re going to find, out of hundreds of people, somebody that’s probably done something wrong.”
DeLay brushed off the torrent of investigative news articles questioning the funding behind the golf, private planes and resort hotels that marked his travel at home and abroad. He even accepted a plane from R.J. Reynolds Tobacco to go to his arraignment. “There’s nothing wrong with it,” he said. “They had a plane available. My schedule was such that I couldn’t do it commercially — that I had to get up there and then get back and do my job. And that’s the only plane that was available at the time.”
Many Republicans will be sad to see him go. DeLay raised huge sums of money for the party, took-no-prisoners in political debate, helped engineer and consolidate Republican control of Congress, pressed for redistricting of key districts in Texas and elsewhere to give Republicans an electoral edge, and built strong bridges to the religious right for the GOP — and was above all a quintessential party man.
Many Democrats will gleefully see him go. DeLay helped consolidate the pay-for-play modus operandi of the Congress, where the House of Representatives became a kind of Disneyland for lobbyists…or, rather, those who contributed to the GOP cause. To some Democrats, “redistricting” basically means rigging future elections by redrawing politically advantageous districts.
To many independent voters (and some GOPers and Democrats as well) DeLay is the poster boy for the politics of polarization and demonization where compromise is viewed as something for softies and the idea is to get your own party’s militants out in force by hitting hot-button issues that provoke outrage. On that front, DeLay is White House political guru Karl Rove’s political soulmate. The duo remain popular with many Republicans but those who seek more consensus, compromise and cooperation in politics consider DeLay a stumbling block to a more thoughtful, quieter kind of politics that eases rather than aggravates existing political divisions.
“Is this the end of Rico?”
If a spate of bad news comes out for DeLay, it’s questionable whether many Republicans would like to see him invading their districts to campaign for them. On the other hand, no matter what his legal problems are, he could remain a behind-the-scenes strategist.
How likely is that? It’ll be a touchy one for Republicans. If an issue becomes what Democrats call the GOP “culture of corruption” then he could find himself unwelcome, even if his case hasn’t been decided yet.
His decision not to run is good news for Democrats because after months of DeLay insisting his legal troubles were only politically-motivated pap the bottom line is that he’s now dropping out of politics. Democrats can (and will) point to that and say: “We told you so!” Even if he still insists it’s all trumped-up politics, to many who read about him dropping out, it’ll seem as if it’s a tacit admission of wrongdoing (which he is making clear it is not). The BAD news is that whomever the GOP picks for his seat in his Republican district in Texas is likely to win.
And for the Republicans? It’s bad news because it’s going to be one more image in the public mind of a top GOPer who faces charges of wrongdoing. But it’s good news because it’s still a long way to Election Day and a political albatross has been removed from the GOP’s neck.
And for the country? With DeLay out of the Congressional mix, it removes one huge roadblock to the politics of cooperation (which still seems a long way off in emerging).
“Is this the end of Rico?” It was in the movie. But we suspect DeLay will be quite active behind the scenes for motives of party loyalty, political competitiveness — and perhaps a dose of old-fashioned revenge. Unless he winds up in a cell.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.