When it comes to Tom DeLay and children’s charities, the House Majority Leader doesn’t have a great history. It was just a year ago that DeLay created a fundraising scheme that offered wealthy GOP donors extravagant benefits under the auspices of helping abused and neglected children.
Now, DeLay has a new initiative — a foster-home project outside Houston.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay on Monday opened a privately financed project touted as an innovative way of giving abused and neglected children a stable foster home environment.
“There is no other place in the entire country that does what we’re trying to do,” the Republican said of the project. “And we hope to take this as a model around the country because the foster care system in every state has problems that need to be dealt with.”
It’s tempting to worry about vulnerable children being exposed to Tom DeLay, but if this is a sincere effort to offer a stable home to kids who desperately need one, good for him.
But as is almost always the case with DeLay, there are reasons for suspicion.
The project also has drawn attention because the first phase includes homes constructed by Houston-based builder Perry Homes. The company is owned by Bob Perry, a Republican Party financial donor who gained notoriety last year as the chief financial backer of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, whose ads criticized the war record of John Kerry.
Joe Conason explained a few months ago that DeLay and Perry have been at this for a while and their intentions may not be entirely pure.
For the past 17 years the DeLays have also operated their own charitable outfit, the DeLay Foundation for Kids, which aims to raise $10 million to build the Oaks at Rio Bend, a special faith-based housing subdivision for a small number of foster families on 50 acres near Richmond, Texas. (Interestingly, the homes are to be constructed by Perry Homes, the company whose enormously wealthy founder, Bob Perry Jr., was the largest donor to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.) Evidently this activity allows DeLay to cut food stamps, children’s health insurance, federal housing and tax credits for the poor while remaining certain that he is a compassionate conservative, doing God’s work. According to DeLay, the intention of his charity’s “biblical” project is “to show that you don’t need a government program to take care of kids.”
What you need instead is a powerful politician with enough influence over government to shake down big donors.
Of all the profound and petty offenses charged against DeLay, his use of a children’s charity to aggrandize himself and raise money from lobbyists and corporations may be the most distasteful. The foundation has received comparatively less attention recently, perhaps because, as a registered charity, the details of its donors and operations are easily kept secret. This is a happy situation for DeLay, since his charitable and political operations continually blur into one another.
The foundation’s fundraisers have included his former deputy chief of staff and a consulting outfit that worked for his political action committees. A spinoff foundation, known as Celebrations for Children, employed his daughter Dani DeLay Ferro (who is also paid by his political action and campaign committees) and two more Republican operatives associated with the Hammer’s political machine. So far, most of the DeLay Foundation’s spending has gone toward fundraising and administration, although ground was broken for the Oaks in September 2003.
Many observers regard the DeLay Foundation as a substitute destination for outlawed “soft money” donations, since companies and lobbyists can give unlimited amounts. Indeed, it may be even better than his old soft-money scams — because the donors need not be identified publicly at all.
The details are not altogether clear, but the suspicion is that DeLay raises money through his charity, trades donation for political access, and remains unaccountable because donations to charities are private.
At this point, DeLay has not exactly earned the benefit of the doubt.