It’s hard to blame Rep. Chris Bell (D-Texas) for feeling a little bitter. Up until fairly recently, the freshman House member looked like a rising star for the Dems — a progressive from Houston, popular in a moderate congressional district, and telegenic enough to have a successful broadcast career before entering politics.<\/p>\n
That was before Tom DeLay decided he could re-redraw Texas’ congressional districts the way he wanted to. Suddenly, Bell was the odd man out, not because voters rejected him, but because a corrupt House Majority Leader stacked the deck against him. After a promising start, Bell found his congressional career finished after just one term.<\/p>\n
Bell decided to do something about it. Some will call it “revenge,” others “justice,” but the result is the same — Bell is filing a House ethics complaint<\/a> against DeLay, the first such complaint filed by one member against another in seven years.<\/p>\n A Democratic congressman plans to file a wide-ranging ethics complaint today against House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), shattering the remnants of a seven-year-old, unwritten ethics truce between the two parties and possibly nudging the House back toward a brand of political warfare that helped topple two speakers.<\/p>\n The complaint, which Rep. Chris Bell (D-Tex.) said he will send to the House ethics committee, accuses the House’s second-ranking Republican of soliciting campaign contributions in return for legislative favors; laundering illegal campaign contributions through a Texas political action committee; and improperly involving a federal agency in a Texas partisan matter.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The unofficial “truce” among the Dems and the GOP will apparently be over. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but there will certainly be ripple effects. Republicans have already promised as much.<\/p>\n A DeLay ally, Rep. John T. Doolittle (R-Calif.), said Republicans “are going to have to respond in kind” by filing ethics charges against key Democrats. From now on, he said in an interview, it’s a matter of “you kill my dog, I’ll kill your cat.” Doolittle said he plans to file ethics charges against a prominent Democrat but would not name the target.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It’s hard to imagine the partisan rancor on Capitol Hill getting worse, but it’s about to. Perhaps fearing reprisals, Democratic aides argued strenuously that the complaint was generated by outside groups and should not be seen as a Democratic-coordinated maneuver.<\/p>\n “This has a certain greater degree of gravitas because it was generated by outside, independent groups and was not something we thought up,” said a Democratic leadership aide. “This is not a Democratic attack. This was done by the outside groups.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I have a hunch this won’t placate the GOP. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) knew about Bell’s complaint in advance and didn’t discourage him from filing it.<\/p>\n For Bell, meanwhile, this is more than just a partisan stunt against an in-state enemy. Bell, who also practiced law for 10 years, is taking this very seriously, working with a federal prosecutor<\/a> to draft the ethics complaint, which will include a laundry list<\/a> of DeLay’s misdeeds.<\/p>\n * It charges that DeLay gave special consideration to Westar Energy Corp., a Kansas-based company, in return for political contributions. <\/p>\n * It also charges DeLay with acting improperly in connection with Texans for a Republican Majority, a fundraising committee run by DeLay strategist Jim Ellis that is being investigated by a Texas district attorney for laundering corporate contributions.<\/p>\n * Third, the complaint asks the committee to review DeLay’s role in prompting the Federal Aviation Administration to release flight information on Texas Speaker Pete Laney’s plane after he and a group of Texas state lawmakers fled to Oklahoma to block a Republican redistricting plan. A Transportation Department investigator later determined that the agency mishandled DeLay’s request for information on the flights.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Stay tuned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s hard to blame Rep. Chris Bell (D-Texas) for feeling a little bitter. Up until fairly recently, the freshman House member looked like a rising star for the Dems — a progressive from Houston, popular in a moderate congressional district, and telegenic enough to have a successful broadcast career before entering politics. That was before […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1939"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1939\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nTo try and stave off retaliation, Dem leaders are arguing that they weren’t behind Bell’s complaint<\/a>, which was filed with assistance from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.<\/p>\n