Joshua Green has a tremendous piece in the current issue of Rolling Stone, of all places, on Tom DeLay and the efforts that have led him into his current predicament. It suggests the left, after years of struggling, has finally figured out how to go after the GOP majority aggressively and effectively.
First, Green sets the stage, reminding us of DeLay’s devious behavior.
After the revelations of the past few weeks, there is no longer any doubt that Rep. Tom DeLay is the most corrupt official in Washington — which is saying a lot, given the ethical standards of Capitol Hill. The Republican majority leader, known as “The Hammer,” has broken nearly every House ethics rule on the books in recent years, enjoying lavish trips paid for by corporate lobbyists and foreign agents.
But DeLay-watchers know all that. Green’s real contribution here is capturing the behind-the-scenes work the left spent the better part of a year completing in order to push DeLay to the brink.
During the past year, a small group of Democrats has been quietly working to call public attention to DeLay’s wrongdoing — and to mobilize public sentiment against him. For the first time since their defeat last November, the Democrats are proving that they too can play rough, demonstrating the kind of determined opposition that many political observers were beginning to doubt them capable of.
Hallelujah.
A year ago, DeLay critics, progressive activists, and good-government groups were determined to highlight the Majority Leader’s corruption and they decided to craft a plan.
During the conference call, leaders of the groups — which ranged from left-leaning outfits like Common Cause and the Campaign for America’s Future to the right-wing Judicial Watch — agreed to form an informal alliance called the Congressional Ethics Coalition. “We went to work trying to find a member of Congress willing to break the [ethics] truce,” says Craig Holman, a legislative representative for Public Citizen. “We wanted to shut down the system of mutual self-preservation and start applying public pressure on them to start enforcing their ethics rules.”
But one member of the alliance had a specific target in mind. “The coalition wanted to complain about the entire ethics process,” says Melanie Sloan, director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “But I wanted to go after Tom DeLay specifically.” Sloan, a former federal prosecutor, was appalled by the way the majority leader routinely pressured trade associations on K Street to fire Democratic lobbyists and replace them with Republicans. She wanted to sue DeLay for “tortuous interference of contractual relations,” but she couldn’t find a lobbyist willing to risk his career by serving as plaintiff. Then, a month after the conference call, she met Chris Bell.
Bell, the former House member who was thrown out of the House due to DeLay’s re-redistricting stunt, broke the truce and went after DeLay in the House Ethics Committee. (Melanie Sloan, director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics and a former federal prosecutor, helped by taking out full-page newspaper ads in the home districts of the committee’s chairman and ranking member.)
And with that, the plan was in motion. The DCCC and its chairman, Rep. Rahm Emanuel, set up a site to provide information to reporters covering the DeLay scandals. Sloan, Green said, “became a veritable one-woman briefing service for the press.” The payments to DeLay’s family, the Jack Abramoff dealings, the shady “charity” for poor children which was actually a perk machine for wealthy GOP donors — each of these were crafted into easy-to-understand narratives and then leaked to the media, one at a time.
On the Hill, Dems capitalized and forced House ethics onto the front burner, eventually forcing the Republicans to back down on the DeLay Rule and the DeLay-inspired changes to the ethics process. In the grassroots, MoveOn.org, the Public Campaign Action Fund, and Campaign for America’s Future started running online and TV ad campaigns. TrueMajority.com created a twelve-foot papier-mache statue of Uncle Sam spanking DeLay, dubbed it the Spank DeLay Mobile, and drove it around Washington. (When the spankmobile arrived in DeLay’s district outside Houston several days later, three local television stations showed up to cover it.)
There’s two points to remember here. One is that the initiative has been largely successful. DeLay is now synonymous with corruption, he’s slipping in the polls in his conservative home district, and lobbyists are fearful to get too close to him for fear of being tainted by scandal.
The other point that shouldn’t get lost in the shuffle: the left finally seems to have figured out how to play this game. Not a moment too soon.