The Hammer Falls

Are the Democrats tough enough to bring down Tom DeLay?

19 May 2005 // After the revelations of the past few weeks, there is no longer any doubt that Rep. Tom DeLay is the most corrupt official in Washington -- which is saying a lot, given the ethical standards of Capitol Hill. The Republican majority leader, known as "The Hammer," has broken nearly every House ethics rule on the books in recent years, enjoying lavish trips paid for by corporate lobbyists and foreign agents. DeLay stayed at the luxurious Hapuna Beach Prince Hotel in Hawaii as a guest of the American Association of Airport Executives, who picked up the $52,000 tab for eight members of Congress. He went golfing in Scotland, Russia and South Korea with family members and aides, racking up $283,000 in expenses that were covered by a host of special interests, including Enron, AT&T and the Nuclear Energy Institute. His wife, Christine, and daughter Danni Ferro have received $500,000 from his campaign for their political work on his behalf -- including a late-night party for corporate donors at the Rio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, where a lobbyist poured champagne over Danni's head while she was in a hot tub on the balcony of DeLay's suite. The majority leader -- a master at covering his tracks by laundering corporate gifts through seemingly innocuous groups like the National Center for Public Policy Research -- insists that his first-class jet-setting is undertaken solely for "educational" purposes.

The accusations against DeLay are hardly new. The congressman from Texas has been openly flouting the law for years, receiving an unprecedented three rebukes in a single week from the House ethics committee after he bribed a fellow Republican to vote for a bill and sold his own vote on another in exchange for a corporate donation. What is new, however, is the momentum that is gathering to oust DeLay for his unethical conduct. With more abuses coming to light each day, even members of his own party are calling for him to resign. DeLay is "an absolute embarrassment to me and to the Republican Party," Rep. Christopher Shays, a Republican from Connecticut, said recently. The man who has long bullied supporters and opponents alike -- once going so far as to order the Department of Homeland Security to help hunt down and arrest Democrat legislators in Texas -- suddenly appears likely to face censure and even indictment.

"Tom DeLay is like a wounded gazelle on the plains of Africa with all the jackals around," says James Thurber, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University. "I think it's going to be very hard for him to survive."

But while the sudden downturn in DeLay's fortunes dominates the headlines, the behind-the-scenes campaign that helped bring about his downfall has gone almost unnoticed. During the past year, a small group of Democrats has been quietly working to call public attention to DeLay's wrongdoing -- and to mobilize public sentiment against him. For the first time since their defeat last November, the Democrats are proving that they too can play rough, demonstrating the kind of determined opposition that many political observers were beginning to doubt them capable of.

"Getting tough and giving Republicans a taste of their own medicine is exactly what the Democratic Party needs to do," says Eric Burns, a former Republican who trained under some of the party's top operatives before defecting to serve as an aide to Rep. Louise Slaughter, the ranking Democrat on the House Rules Committee and a leading DeLay critic. "This is a great example of the party growing and learning how to wage its battles effectively."

The campaign to take down tom DeLay began exactly a year ago. Fed up with ethical misconduct in Congress, representatives from a handful of public-interest groups arranged a conference call last May to discuss what they could do about it. It seemed like their hands were tied. Thanks to a rule change engineered by DeLay, outside groups have been unable to file ethics complaints against congressmen since 1997. What's more, both parties, reeling from years of brutal ethics battles that had claimed a Democratic speaker (Jim Wright) as well as a Republican one (Newt Gingrich), had established an informal truce in 1997, tacitly agreeing not to file ethics complaints against one another. "The ethics oversight process in the House is completely paralyzed," Trevor Potter, a veteran of the first Bush administration and head of the Campaign Legal Center, said more than a year ago. Indeed, before last year's triple rebuke of DeLay, the committee had not taken action against a member of Congress since Gingrich was fined and reprimanded in 1997 for using tax-exempt money to finance political activities.

During the conference call, leaders of the groups -- which ranged from left-leaning outfits like Common Cause and the Campaign for America's Future to the right-wing Judicial Watch -- agreed to form an informal alliance called the Congressional Ethics Coalition. "We went to work trying to find a member of Congress willing to break the truce," says Craig Holman, a legislative representative for Public Citizen. "We wanted to shut down the system of mutual self-preservation and start applying public pressure on them to start enforcing their ethics rules."

But one member of the alliance had a specific target in mind. "The coalition wanted to complain about the entire ethics process," says Melanie Sloan, director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "But I wanted to go after Tom DeLay specifically." Sloan, a former federal prosecutor, was appalled by the way the majority leader routinely pressured trade associations on K Street to fire Democratic lobbyists and replace them with Republicans. She wanted to sue DeLay for "tortuous interference of contractual relations," but she couldn't find a lobbyist willing to risk his career by serving as plaintiff. Then, a month after the conference call, she met Chris Bell.

Bell, a Democratic congressman from Texas, had just lost his bid for re-election after DeLay, in a typical power grab, arranged to redraw the state's congressional districts to favor Republicans. "They had rigged the playing field because DeLay wanted his people in there, people who would be at his beck and call," Bell says. With help from Sloan -- and with nothing to lose -- Bell took a monumental step: Before leaving office, he broke the seven-year truce and filed a complaint against DeLay with the House ethics committee for a host of abuses. "Where else but Washington would it make sense to have a truce on ethics?" he says.

To ensure that Bell received a fair hearing, Sloan ran full-page newspaper ads in the home districts of the committee's chairman, Rep. Joel Hefley, and its ranking member, Rep. Alan Mollohan, calling for a complete investigation. In September, the Democrats scored their first major victory: The bipartisan committee unanimously rebuked DeLay for bribing Rep. Nick Smith by offering to support his son's congressional bid in exchange for Smith's vote on a prescription-drug bill. The committee also admonished DeLay for swapping political favors for campaign contributions and for misusing his authority to ask federal aviation officials to locate political opponents in Texas.

"These types of antics have been going on for years with Tom DeLay," says Bell. "We succeeded in pushing him above the radar screen."

With DeLay's ethical violations suddenly on public display, other Democrats rallied to the cause, and the pursuit of the majority leader took off. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, under the leadership of Rep. Rahm Emanuel, set up a Web site to provide information to reporters covering the DeLay scandal. "Emanuel is much more aggressive than the previous leadership of the DCCC," says Sloan. "He made this a real priority."

DeLay blames others for his troubles, accusing "journalistic activists" and "a left-wing syndicate" of conspiring to topple him. But the majority leader has given his opponents plenty of ammunition. Armed with DeLay's abuses, Sloan became a veritable one-woman briefing service for the press. She tipped off the New York Times and other newspapers about the $500,000 in campaign funds pocketed by DeLay's wife and daughter, and she documented his questionable dealings with lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who is under investigation for bilking several Indian tribes out of $82 million. She also directed reporters to a "charity" for poor children run by DeLay that offered lavish perks to big political donors, including private cruises, Broadway tickets to top shows and late-night parties with the likes of Lynyrd Skynyrd and Blues Traveler. This came on the heels of a complaint that Sloan filed when DeLay -- the recipient of $40,000 in campaign contributions from Bacardi -- slipped a provision into a defense-appropriations bill allowing the company to expropriate the trademark of a lucrative rum label owned by the Cuban government. "We've also been feeding the press stories about how biased the members of the ethics committee are -- how they take money and give money to DeLay," says Sloan.

The campaign against DeLay picked up even more steam in January, when the majority leader arranged for Hefley and other Republicans on the ethics committee to be fired and replaced with handpicked loyalists. The new appointees promptly eliminated a longstanding ethics rule that required indicted members to step down, allowing DeLay to continue as majority leader even if he winds up facing charges. But the "jury tampering," as one House member describes it, backfired, provoking an infuriated Democratic leadership to take the fight public. Still reeling from their defeat in November, the Democrats suddenly realized that DeLay had handed them a weapon they could use in their struggle to regain the majority. "This broadened the issue and provided a frame that allowed us to paint these guys as completely arrogant and out of touch," says Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid.

"They've completely made a mockery of the ethics process," adds Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, the House minority leader. "They've purged the ethics committee of Republicans who dared to criticize DeLay and replaced them with two people" -- Reps. Tom Cole of Oklahoma and Lamar Smith of Texas -- "who made contributions to Tom DeLay's legal defense fund." Pelosi and Slaughter released a 147-page report highlighting DeLay's abuses, and Democrats on the ethics committee refused to participate in meetings. The committee was forced to rescind its "DeLay rule" that allowed indicted members to remain in office, and Cole and Smith reluctantly recused themselves from upcoming hearings on the majority leader's misconduct.

"The real reason Democrats ended up doing so well is because Republicans screwed up by amending the rules to let DeLay stay in power if he was indicted," says Sloan. "That was stupid. They thought it was an inside-baseball maneuver that no one would notice. But all of a sudden, people were calling their congressmen and saying, 'How the hell did you vote on the DeLay rule?' "

At the same time, a variety of liberal groups were pitching in to generate public pressure on DeLay. Online activists at MoveOn.org launched an Internet campaign to make voters aware of his misconduct, and Campaign for America's Future ran television ads criticizing the majority leader in his own district. "Tom DeLay is an emblem of the Republican Party's corruption," says Toby Chaudhuri, a spokesman for the group. "We thought voters in his district should know about it." The relatively modest ad buy of $100,000 generated a staggering 229 newspaper stories about DeLay in a single week. The Public Campaign Action Fund also ran television ads, broadening the fight by targeting the districts of Republicans across the country who face tough re-election battles.

In one particularly creative campaign, a group called TrueMajority.com built a twelve-foot papier-mache statue of Uncle Sam spanking DeLay, dubbed it the Spank DeLay Mobile and drove it around Washington. "We thought it presents the best image to talk about DeLay and the different ethical violations the guy's committed," says Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben and Jerry's, who helped oversee the effort. When the spankmobile arrived in DeLay's district outside Houston several days later, three local television stations showed up to cover the event.

The combined Democratic effort has taken a serious toll on the majority leader. Once considered untouchable, DeLay, who has been in Congress since 1984, won re-election last year with only fifty-five percent of the vote in a heavily Republican district. There are signs that even conservatives are becoming fed up: A recent poll taken in his district showed that fifty-one percent of voters disapprove of DeLay. As his situation worsens, longtime supporters are beginning to abandon him. Even DeLay's connections on K Street are drying up: The corporate lobbyists who routinely supplied him with private jets and other cherished perks are suddenly refusing his requests for fear of being tainted by scandal. "People who rule by fear, as DeLay has done, frequently find that when something happens to them, there are very few people around to support them," says Thurber of American University.

Whether or not DeLay is forced to resign, his increasing troubles have been a boon to the Democrats. Nick Lampson, a former congressman from Texas who lost his seat after DeLay ordered his district redrawn, has announced that he will run against the majority leader next year. "It is clear that he has a reached a point where people are fed up with the controversy, the scandal and the corruption," Lampson says. "He's not the kind of role model that voters of his district want representing them." In what observers expect to likely be the highest-profile House race in years, the Texas Democrat will enjoy the fervent support of his party, which is eager to defeat DeLay. "Lampson will clearly be the most credible opponent DeLay has faced since joining Congress," says Amy Walter, a political handicapper for The Cook Political Report.

Even more significant, the campaign against DeLay has provided the entire party with a pointed message that it can use as a central theme in next year's elections. "The Democrats have recognized that the ethics front can be an effective assault against Republicans in the upcoming elections," says Craig Holman of Public Citizen. Indeed, word from Capitol Hill is that Democratic House leaders are going so far as to recruit "squeaky clean" candidates to run in '06 to further highlight the ethical disparity between the two parties. "The Democratic strategy right now is to make ethics the issue it should be," says Bell, whose ethics complaint sparked the crusade against DeLay. "We have to make the Democratic Party the one that stands for an ethical, transparent and accountable government." Should that happen, Tom DeLay could find himself not just out of a job but cast in a role he surely never imagined: the savior of the Democratic Party.