[Mb-civic] DeLay's Texas Model - David S. Broder - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

DeLay's Texas Model

By David S. Broder
Tuesday, January 10, 2006; A15

It is hard to develop much sympathy for Tom DeLay, who resigned last 
week as Republican majority leader of the House, after his indictment in 
Texas on campaign finance charges was followed by guilty pleas from Jack 
Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, two of his lobbyist buddies who now 
threaten to blow the whistle on congressional corruption.

DeLay's saga appears to be a classic case of pride going before a fall, 
with a hard-edged, arrogant political operative tripped up by his own 
tactics. The onetime pest exterminator is not someone for whom one sheds 
tears.

But for some reason I cannot escape the sensation that DeLay is a man 
caught in a time warp, the victim of a tradition far antedating his 
coming to Congress in 1985.

If Tom DeLay was blind to the perils of mixing money and politics, 
business and government, he was true to the tradition of his state, 
where the long-dominant Democratic Party plumbed all possible 
permutations of that intimate connection.

To take but one example, consider the phone conversation between Lyndon 
B. Johnson and George Brown, chairman of the board of Brown & Root, the 
construction giant, on Jan. 2, 1964, soon after Johnson became 
president, as quoted in "Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 
1963-1964."

As Michael Beschloss, the editor of the volume, summarized the 
conversation, "Brown, one of Johnson's earliest financial backers, . . . 
has asked him on behalf of another old supporter, Gus Wortham, a Houston 
insurance tycoon, and John Jones, president of the Houston Chronicle, to 
ask Robert Kennedy's antitrust officials to suspend antitrust 
restrictions against a merger they are seeking between two Houston 
banks. As a master horse-trader, Johnson . . . wants a written promise 
from Jones that the Chronicle will support him as long as he is president."

Brown tells Johnson that Albert Thomas, the Houston congressman who is 
also working on the merger, thinks that the deal the president wants is 
"too much of a cash-and-carry thing . . . too much of a trade. . . . 
It'd hurt you as well as them."

But Johnson won't be deterred. "If they don't want to tell me that 
they're my friends in writing. . . . I'm not going to do it as long as 
their attitude's that way. You get me that letter," Johnson orders, " . 
. . and I'll have them sit down with the Controller of the Currency and 
we'll override the whole goddamned outfit. And they'll do it, to hold 
their own jobs."

That is how business was done. Johnson himself inherited the tradition, 
because, as Michael Ennis writes in the current issue of the Texas 
Monthly, "the government -- and its shrewd exploitation by generations 
of enterprising Texas [businessmen] -- has had an essential role in 
literally raising modern Texas up from the dirt. . . . What saved us 
from a permanent depression was a powerful presence in Washington," 
embodied in men such as Vice President John Garner, Speaker Sam Rayburn 
and Jesse Jones, the Houston banker who headed the New Deal's 
Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

These men and many others steered government contracts and huge projects 
to Texas, in turn reaping the campaign funds that not only financed 
their own races but also allowed them to become donors to many 
colleagues. That is how Johnson rose to leadership and also how he 
became personally wealthy.

As DeLay was to do later on, these Texans placed their trusted aides in 
key corporate, trade association and lobbying jobs, and built a network 
of Washington lawyers who moved back and forth from government service 
to handling mergers and contracts on corporate retainers. DeLay's "K 
Street Project" of moving Republican staffers into similar positions in 
law firms and lobbies was no innovation; it was simply an adaptation of 
the old plan.

And his fondness for earmarks in appropriations bills, as a way of 
securing the loyalty and votes of his members, was, again, simply more 
of the model that previous generations of Texas politicians had 
followed. The federal treasury was their favorite tool for building 
grass-roots political support.

The courts will ultimately decide whether DeLay has broken the law in 
any of his dealings. Times change, and standards change with them. But 
Washington has lived with an incestuous relationship between business 
and government for many decades -- and the Texas model is simply an 
extreme example of its familiar pattern.

It will take much more than hounding Tom DeLay out of office to change 
the culture of this city.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/09/AR2006010901431.html
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