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Troubled Waters
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| Contributor | ArmyDem |
| Last Edited | ArmyDem Oct 02, 2005 03:21pm |
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| Category | General |
| News Date | Sunday, October 2, 2005 09:20:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | War, storms, leak probes—and a growing array of ethics clouds. Dark days for the Republican Party.
By Howard Fineman and Eleanor Clift
Newsweek
Oct. 10, 2005 issue - In the Tom DeLay era—now at least temporarily ended—a meeting of the House Republican Conference usually was a ceremonial affair, at which "Leadership" (always a single word, spoken with a mixture of awe and fear) clued in the flock on Done Deals. The proceedings had the spontaneity of a Baath Party conclave. But last week the erstwhile majority leader, and the rest of the Leadership he had forged since taking effective control of the House in the late '90s, was struggling to maintain its grip. The members applauded him as he proclaimed his innocence of the charge leveled against him: that he had funneled streams of laundered corporate cash into legislative races in Texas. They cheered as he attacked the Democratic prosecutor in Austin. And they didn't argue when he denounced the conference itself for having written a rule that barred him from continuing to serve as majority leader, even under indictment. Speaker Denny Hastert, ever the avuncular wrestling coach, gave a pep talk on the virtues of unity in adversity.
Still, when it came time to discuss precisely what would happen next, discipline broke down. DeLay and Hastert had wanted Rep. David Dreier to step in as acting majority leader. Instead, the hard-charging Roy Blunt got the job. Members demanded full-scale elections sooner rather than later for a new permanent Leadership, and if DeLay doesn't escape his legal problem by January—hardly a certainty—that vote will occur and he won't be in the race. Reaching for inspiration, one acolyte compared the Speaker to Robert E. Lee and DeLay to Stonewall Jackson: when the latter was wounded, the former still won a crucial battle. But another member elicited wry laughter by pointing out that Jackson had been shot, accidentally, by his own troops. |
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