Who Let the Dogs In? (53 page)

DeLay’s anti-environmental passions go back to his days as a bug exterminator in Houston, when he came to admire DDT. He believes the forbidden poison is a benign substance that should be in use today, and also believes the pesticides mirex and chlordane should be brought back. The EPA says mirex and chlordane are both dangerous to human health: Mirex is cited as a possible carcinogen and was found in breast milk all over the South in the seventies. DeLay claims that the EPA’s ban on mirex caused fire ants to spread throughout the South.

DeLay also dismisses evidence linking chlorofluorocarbons to destruction of the ozone layer. When the three scientists who discovered the link were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1995, DeLay sneeringly called it “the Nobel appeasement prize.” DeLay does not believe in acid rain: He holds that the acid ruining Northeastern lakes is in the soil, and he suggests adding lime. He does not believe in global warming either: “It’s the arrogance of man to think that man can change the climate of the world. Only nature can change the climate. A volcano, for instance.”

DeLay’s normal fare is hyperbole. He once described the Democrats’ constituents as “Greenpeace, Queer Nation and the National Education Association.” But then he also told
The New Republic
that he was proud of his own coalition, “all kinds of people, from the Christian Coalition to the Eagle Forum, from Arco to Exxon.”

His real constituency is the lobbying corps, and the sleazy smell that rises from their vigorous cooperation is another reason for DeLay’s vulnerability. His motto is blunt: “If you want to play in our revolution, you have to live by our rules.” DeLay’s rules are upfront, apparent to anyone who cares to look. On his desk he keeps a list of the four hundred largest political action committees and the amounts and percentages they’ve contributed to Republicans and Democrats. Those committees that have given heavily to the GOP are labeled “friendly,” the others “unfriendly.” He also pressures corporations and trade groups to fire Democrats and hire Republicans as their lobbyists. Says DeLay, “We’re just following the adage of punish your enemies and reward your friends. We don’t like to deal with people who are trying to kill the revolution. We know who they are. The word is out.” His fund-raising letters to lobbyists are blunt enough to help earn him the nickname the Hammer.

In late 1995
The Washington Post
reported on DeLay’s “friendly” and “unfriendly” lists, and soon after, Ralph Nader’s Congressional Accountability Project began an investigation. In September 1996 CAP director Gary Ruskin asked the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct to investigate possible violations of standards of congressional conduct by DeLay. Citing the lists, Ruskin suggested DeLay may have directly linked campaign contributions to official action, in violation of the House rule barring “considerations such as political support, party affiliation or campaign contributions” from affecting “either the decision of a member to provide assistance, or the quality of the help that is given.”

Ruskin also raised questions about DeLay’s brother Randy, who practiced law by himself in Houston until Tom got elected majority whip. Randy promptly became a registered foreign lobbyist and in one year (according to federal records) banked more than $550,000. Along the way, Randy appears to have lobbied his brother on behalf of his clients—and gotten results.

The “vigorous assistance by Representative DeLay in support of the efforts of his lobbyist brother produces the clear impression,” said Gary Ruskin, “that Representative DeLay has provided special and inappropriate political favors to his brother and to Cemex,” a Mexican cement manufacturer. Citing other cases in which the DeLay brothers had worked for the same goal, Ruskin suggested that the whip’s actions may have violated the Code of Ethics for Government Service that says no one in government should “discriminate unfairly by the dispensing of special favors or privileges to anyone.”

DeLay was undeterred, and eventually the House Ethics Committee dismissed the complaint. The Committee did advise him it was “particularly important” for a person in his position to avoid any hint that a “request for access or for official action” was linked to campaign contributions.

Then, during the Senate trial, there were headlines concerning allegations that DeLay had not told the truth five years ago in a deposition regarding a business dispute with a former associate in the pest-control business. DeLay testified under oath that he had not been involved with the company for two or three years, even though he filed congressional financial disclosure forms saying otherwise. An aide tried to squelch the stories, blaming “political enemies” and asserting that “eventually the truth will come out.”

For all his bluster, DeLay appears to have used “legalese and lawyerese to do two-steps around the questions.” Those words, ironically, are his own: He uttered them in denouncing President Clinton for allegedly trying to evade the truth. No matter how the various cases play out, DeLay has certainly made himself vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy.

WHEN DELAY
sees an opponent, his instinct is to get rid of him. In 1997 he attacked federal judges who had made rulings that annoyed him and declared his intention to impeach them. “As part of our conservative efforts against judicial activism, we are going after judges,” he said. “We intend to . . . go after them in a big way.” DeLay never mentioned criminal conduct as grounds for impeachment, except insofar as he regarded political views other than his own as criminal. His efforts were so outrageous that even fellow right-wingers opposed his plans.

DeLay may be more sensitive about his vulnerability than his “acid tongue” and “penchant for rhetorical excess,” to cite two euphemisms from the press about him, suggest. In April 1997 Wisconsin Representative David Obey brandished what was by then a two-year-old
Washington Post
article describing how lobbyists wrote drafts of legislation with DeLay’s help. DeLay denied “categorically that it ever happened” and challenged Obey to identify the participants. When Obey waved the article under DeLay’s nose, DeLay shoved him and called him a “gutless chickenshit.”

After the shoving incident, DeLay’s spokesman said, “The reason Mr. DeLay was upset was that Obey . . . had questioned his integrity.” DeLay ought to be used to that by now.

Last summer, during the House’s struggle over campaign finance reform, DeLay was the point man for anti-reformers. Day after day he stood in the well, using every parliamentary advantage leadership gives to kill the reform. A majority of House members ultimately voted for it anyway.

“Most Americans deplore what Larry Flynt is doing and at the same time hope he comes up with something truly dreadful on Tom DeLay,” satirist Calvin Trillin observed. Probably true. DeLay may turn out to have been the wrong man at the wrong time for his own cause. He was, after all, an adequate number two when Newt Gingrich’s departure left a vacuum in GOP leadership. DeLay had no hesitation about stepping into the vacuum—and recklessly taking the party over a cliff by identifying the unpopular impeachment process with the Republican Party. Will voters get even in 2000? DeLay seems heedless of the risks and ever more consumed by his desire to punish Bill Clinton. He’s laughing now, but maybe not last.

May 1999

Tom DeLay II

T
ORONT
O
— oh, no, how embarrassing. Here I am, visiting the neighbors, who inquire—in their calm, polite, rational, Canadian way—if I could possibly explain for them . . .

Being Canadian is like living next door to the Simpsons. Here are all these patient, sensible, kind people (I swear, their real national motto is “Now, let’s not get excited”) living right next to “the States,” where some hideously noisy psychodrama is always going on.

Although I have yet to encounter a Canadian who will say so in as many words—they are well-mannered folk—they clearly think we have gone completely around the twist this time.

“Could you explain,” asked a gentleman from the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., “this congressman—is it DeHay?”

“DeLay,” I replied with morbid presentiment.

“Yes, Congressman DeLay of your state of Texas.”

Sometimes it’s hard to know what to say. Really, really hard. Our Man DeLay, the former bug exterminator from Sugar Land, Texas, has recently distinguished himself by attacking President Clinton for having expressed regret about America’s role in the slave trade and for having apologized for sitting by while genocide occurred in Rwanda, the latter event having occurred on Clinton’s watch.

Said DeLay of Clinton, according to
The New York Times:
“Here’s a flower child with gray hairs doing exactly what he did back in the sixties: He is apologizing for the actions of the United States wherever he went. It just offends me that the president of the United States is directly or indirectly attacking his own country in a foreign land. It just amazes me.”

DeLay, the Republican majority whip, also said: “He didn’t quite apologize for the chieftains in Uganda that were selling the blacks to the slave traders, did he? Heh. He didn’t talk about what’s-his-name, Idi Amin, who killed five hundred thousand people in Uganda. He didn’t apologize for that. You know, he’s very quick to apologize for other people’s mistakes, and can’t apologize for his own, and it comes right down to character.”

I winced at the thought that this extraordinary statement had been parsed by Canadians hoping to make some sense of it. Let’s see—the American president apologized for America’s role in the slave trade, and he expressed regret for having let the genocide in Rwanda go on without much interference. And the congressman finds this offensive.

Uh, I said alertly. Well. The congressman is not expected to go into the diplomatic field anytime in the near future.

“Ah,” said the Canadian politely, “I see.”

Actually, I don’t. I utterly fail to see how apologizing for America’s role in the slave trade can be construed as attacking our country. And I cannot think of a single historical lesson that has been more emphasized in the fifty years since the Holocaust than that civilized nations must not let genocide occur without attempting to do something about it.

And by the way, Clinton was never a sixties flower child. By all accounts and records, he was a politically ambitious young man from at least high school on.

“Yours is a curious country,” observed a television producer here, in mild Canadian fashion, “more concerned about secondhand smoke than guns.” The events in Jonesboro, Arkansas, have of course not gone unremarked by our benevolent neighbors.

Uh. Well. Sure. Guns don’t kill—children do.

As for our current obsession, most Canadians are so embarrassed by the whole tawdry mess that they are reluctant even to ask about it. “It couldn’t happen here,” said a book publisher with a mild Canadian twinkle. “Canadian politicians don’t have sex.”

Canadians themselves often observe that much of their national sense of identity stems from defining themselves as “not like the States.” Some of them describe themselves as the proverbial flea next to the elephant or regret their relative insignificance to the bigger, richer, more go-go States.

But Alan Gregg, a sort of Canadian David Frost, said of this phenomenon: “There’s actually a fair amount of moral superiority in our way of contrasting ourselves to the States. The implication is always: We wouldn’t have gotten ourselves involved in Vietnam because we are so peaceful; we wouldn’t have race troubles because we are so tolerant. We’re a bit smug, actually. It’s a bad failing.” Canadians, unlike DeLay, do not hesitate to examine their national conscience.

The resentments harbored by the World’s Best Neighbors are often to be found under that notoriously bland headline, “Canadian Trade Talks Continue.” You may recall that last year, Canadian salmon fishermen finally took action after seven years—seven years!—of trade talks that were supposed to iron out respective fishing rights on the West Coast.

Canada is, of course, enjoying a veritable Renaissance in the arts, with Canadian film and literature flowering in splendid profusion. This is because the Canadians, in their practical Canadian way, set up a commission on the arts in the fifties and decided to invest some money in them, with spectacular results. Unfortunately, many of their films can’t even get distribution in Canada because Americans own the distribution system. If you want to see a Canadian in a state that might be described as “somewhat angry,” find one in the film business and mention the name Jack Valenti. Canadian Trade Talks Continue in that regard, too.