If nothing else comes of the various investigations and lawsuits now plaguing U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land, there will be an accumulation of pungent quotes. Some are from the Bug Man himself. “I have attorneys all over the place,” DeLay mused to reporters last week. “I consult attorneys before I leave my office and make sure I am doing everything legally and ethically.” This was in response to continuing revelations that DeLay was directly involved in raising corporate money for the state legislative campaigns, and the subsequent congressional re-redistricting effort, funded by Texans for a Republican Majority, the state political action committee founded by DeLay and modeled on his Americans for a Republican Majority.
The Washington Post and the Houston Chronicle each recently reported that DeLay and his committee specifically solicited personal and corporate funds from now defunct Houston energy-giant Enron in the spring of 2001, just as the Securities and Exchange Commission was launching an investigation of the company’s books. A DeLay spokesman responded that Democrats were taking Enron’s money as well. True enough. But no one has yet found evidence that any Democrats were happily commingling corporate and personal campaign donations and using both in direct expenses on Texas legislative campaigns – despite the state’s longstanding ban on corporate campaign cash.
Commented Cris Feldman, the Austin attorney who has filed suit on behalf of several defeated Democratic legislative candidates, “I guess DeLay and his team forgot they were from Texas, [where] the prohibition against clandestine corporate cash is 100 years old.” Under Texas law, corporate (or union) donations can be used only for “administrative” expenses like office space or utilities; TRMPAC used its corporate cash in polling, direct mail, fundraising, opposition research – and now insists those uses are all legal.
Faced with the civil lawsuits, a criminal investigation by Travis Co. District Attorney Ronnie Earle, and now a formal congressional ethics complaint filed by re-redistricted and defeated U.S. Rep. Chris Bell, D-Houston, DeLay has hired a couple of Austin criminal attorneys who are looking hard for lemonade among the lemons. Said one, Bill White, of the accusations against his client, “He reads his name in the newspapers every day as a target of investigation because he came up with the [TRMPAC] concept,” White said. “It’s like coming up with the idea of the Boy Scouts and having a troop go bad.”
In the wake of reports that most of the Republican members of the U.S. House Ethics Committee had received contributions from DeLay’s various PACs, several watchdog groups, including Common Cause, Public Citizen, and Texans for Public Justice, called last week for an independent investigation of the Bell ethics complaint. In response, DeLay spokesman Jonathan Grella said board members of the organizations had contributed to Democrats and described them as nothing more than “Democrat front groups.”
This article appears in July 23 • 2004.
