Tom DeLay, the ethically challenged former bug exterminator from Texas, is not a Republican anomaly. In fact, the Bug Man is the most representative leader of what the congressional wing of the GOP has become.
The promise of the 1994 Republican takeover of the House of Representatives was to reform the institution and promote conservative principles of limited government, fiscal
prudence, and the rights of states and localities. The Republican pledge, summed up in the now laughable Contract with America, was to end the crony culture that had developed during 40 years of Democratic control.
But after a decade of Republican rule, with DeLay calling most of the shots, the new boss is identical to the old boss -- and maybe even worse. Like the French revolutionaries who stormed the Bastille and then created their own reign of terror, the Republicans who seized power on a promise of clean management now run the House with an appalling indifference to ethical standards.
What the Bug Man embodies is not just inside-the-Beltway sleaze, but the sordid outcome of a rebellion against power that has resulted in an entrenched and arrogant congressional establishment that would embarrass Boss Tweed.
With DeLay at the piano, Republicans have turned the House of Representatives into a virtual political
brothel, where legislation is up for sale to the highest bidder. Rather than trimming government, the GOP has committed itself to the expansion of the corporate welfare state -- to better serve its paymasters. One of the Bug Man's clearest ethical transgressions, for example, was his whipping the
vote on the 2004 Medicare drug bill, a boon for the drug industry.
Yet the Bug Man is as clever as he is corrupt. Even as his ethics problems mounted, he was smiling like the Cheshire cat. While his colleagues were heading for the tall grass, the Bug Man outmaneuvered the Boy Genius, Karl Rove. That's because, perhaps even more than Rove, the
Bug Man understands the adage, "Live by the base, die by the base."
By speaking righteous words to the right -- about Terry Schiavo and judicial appointments -- the Bug Man was attaching himself to the true believers, making himself bullet-proof to attempts by establishment Republicans to undermine his rule. By tying the right's fate to his, the majority leader forced the most powerful man in the world to take him in. With his own popularity faltering, President
Bush can't afford to antagonize his own base.
Regardless of the outcome of investigations into his ethics, the Bug Man has clearly become the
symbol of a Republican revolution gone off the rails. And it's not just the majority leader's transgressions that have betrayed the noble undertaking. The overwhelming majority of the House Republican rank and file kept him in power while supporting his dubious ethical standards
and legislative tactics. Even beyond the House, the leadership of the conservative movement has also enabled the Bug Man's rule.
They are all "DeLayicans" now.
