It's no big news that the one-time insurgents of the Republican Revolution that took over Congress back in 1994 have gotten comfy-cozy with the prerogatives of Washington power. And no one has pursued that power more relentlessly, abrasively, and with total disregard for ethical appearances and the minimal requirements of bipartisanship than House Republican Whip Tom DeLay of Texas. And now, with several of his close political associates under indictment back home in Texas for criminal violations allegedly committed in the course of one of DeLay's most cherished personal projects, the "Hammer's" House GOP colleagues are rushing to change a 1993 ethics rule that requires their leaders to temporarily step aside if they are indicted for a felony that carries a prison term of two or more years.

It's not as though this is the first time DeLay has fallen under an ethical cloud. He was rebuked not once but twice by the House Ethics Committee during the last few months. He is one of the chief engineers of the notorious "K Street Strategy," a highly organized GOP effort to intimidate trade associations and lobbying firms into not only skewing campaign contributions to Republicans-only, but agreeing to hire Republicans-only for staff positions. Indeed, just this fall House Republicans tried to "punish" the Motion Picture Association of America by deleting a tax break for the film industry from its pre-election "Christmas Tree" batch of industry-specific tax cuts. MPAA's "sin" was hiring former Democratic Congressman and Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman as its chief.

The criminal indictment that DeLay's friends now fear is impending flows out of another of DeLay's outrageous stunts: the Great Texas Power Grab, which involved a re-redistricting of U.S, House districts in the Lone Star State designed (successfully) to defeat several moderate-to-conservative Democratic incumbents and boost the GOP's margin of control in the House. According to the Texas indictments, DeLay's associates broke state laws while shaking down corporations for the cash needed to get Republican state legislators elected in 2002, the prerequisite for the Power Grab. It is clear that the rules change being sought to protect DeLay's position is in anticipation of the strong possibility that he will be indicted for the same alleged crimes.

Indeed, House Republicans are openly making the argument that any potential indictment of DeLay by Austin District Attorney Ronnie Earle would be part of a "political witch hunt" that should not be afforded any legitimacy in Washington. Never mind that Earle is an elected district attorney working with a properly constituted grand jury, or that he has in the past prosecuted many Democrats on corruption changes. And never mind that House GOP leaders are setting themselves up as the sole and sovereign judges of when a prosecution of an elected official is "political" in nature. This is pretty rich coming from a group of politicians who turned politically motivated legal actions into a high art form throughout the 1990s.

U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), in making the "political witch hunt" argument to The Hill newspaper yesterday, made the House GOP's real beef pretty apparent: The potential indictment of DeLay, he said, represented a rearguard action by Democrats who have not yet come to grips with the fact that "Republicans are a permanent majority."

A permanent majority! This is a pretty good summary of the Congressional Republican attitude these days, and it's the very epitome of the arrogance of power. As The Hill's Jonathan Kaplan pointedly noted, way back in 1987, the avatar of the Republican Revolution, Newt Gingrich, said this about the ethics lapses of the Democrats who controlled Congress at that time: "[You] now have a House where it is more dangerous to be aggressive about honesty than it is to be mildly corrupt.... You now have a situation where I think people feel almost invulnerable."

Whether or not that was true in 1987, it's emphatically true today. We know a lot of Republicans think their election victory on November 2 represented a "mandate" to do pretty much whatever they want. But voters did not give them a mandate for corruption, or for avidly courting the appearance of corruption by telling the ethical recidivist Tom DeLay they don't care what he's done.