Chained to the Ballot
NY Times Editorial
The former House majority leader Tom DeLay, master practitioner of tooth-and-claw politics, finds himself in a predicament. He’s been cast adrift somewhere between Texas and Virginia after a court struck down his parting Congressional gambit.
Mr. DeLay, a proud Texan, quit Congress earlier this year, clearly fearing political defeat as he faced trial on charges of campaign money laundering. He could see the Congressional ethics scandal blossom around his old buddy, Jack Abramoff, the now-famously corrupt lobbyist. Before parting, however, the combative Republican could not resist a final power play.
Rather than simply letting the Republican voters choose a new nominee for his Houston seat, Mr. DeLay ran in his party’s primary and won. Then he resigned, angling to have his precinct bosses anoint a noncontroversial and hand-picked replacement for the November ballot.
Texas law makes it difficult for a Congressional candidate to give up a nomination after winning a primary — in order to stave off the exact kind of manipulation Mr. DeLay intended. But once the ballots had been safely tallied, he blithely pronounced himself a newly dedicated son of suburban Virginia and no longer eligible to run for office in Texas.
Not so fast, ruled U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks, undoing Mr. DeLay’s political retirement in a stroke of the pen.
“There is no evidence that DeLay will still be living in Virginia tomorrow, let alone November 7,” wrote Judge Sparks, a Republican appointee who found no room in the law for bait-and-switch politicking.
Frantic Republicans — not the least of them Mr. DeLay — are seeking a fast reversal on appeal to keep their beloved champion off the ballot. Bring him on, demand Democrats, who love to use Mr. DeLay as a symbol for everything that is wrong with Washington.
Mr. DeLay has gamed the system so many times — most famously by gerrymandering the Texas Congressional districts — that he may have presumed a minor thing like fixing the Republican nomination for his own seat was his to control. It might be a fitting punishment to force him to run for Congress while explaining to his constituents why he tried so hard to abandon them for the green fields of the Washington suburbs.
My only comment: That’s karma.
An Aging Trans Woman 
Leave a comment