It's Time For Delay To Go

I read to my relief the other day that I am not the only one uncomfortable with the direction the House Republican Caucus is heading under the leadership of Rep. Tom Delay. My primary concern is that we are slowly beginning to look like the Democratic majority we replaced in the Republican invasion of 1994. The GOP was able to sweep control of congress that year primarily because the Democrats had grown a little too comfortable in their forty-plus year control of the House, they were slightly corrupt and they abused their power. Their decades-long majority status led them to take advantage of that status and the American people didn't approve of it.

Now I fear that a similar phenomenon is taking place with the Republican caucus led by Rep. Delay. Though he has done nothing overtly scandalous, his growing pattern of actions are frighteningly similar to the Democratic majority that got the boot over ten years ago. For example, he has changed Ethics Committee rules to disallow investigations of Representatives on a party-line vote, which would obviously benefit the majority in the House. He has also attempted to change other ethics rules to allow a party leader to retain his post if indicted. Fortunately he failed in this attempt, but the fact that he came so close to convincing House Republicans to lower ethics standards seriously agitated me.

These two instances are just a couple in a rather long list of questionable actions taken by Rep. Delay. He has formed a political action committee that is being investigated for money laundering and illegal campaign contributions (though to be fair, the man doing the investigating is a blatant political hack). He has also gone on junkets overseas on a few lobbyist's dime, which is in direct conflict with House ethics guidelines. To me Rep. Delay's lax ethics represent a troubling sense of arrogance, and as the WSJ put it, "Mr. DeLay, who rode to power in 1994 on a wave of revulsion at the everyday ways of big government, has become the living exemplar of some of its worst habits."

If House Republicans continue to have Rep. Delay as their leader than they will slowly devolve into the twin of the Democratic majority defeated in '94. Republicans in the House should stand for now what they stood for then; limited government that is beholden to the people and that conducts itself with the utmost honesty and integrity. For the more the House GOP strays away from these principles that brought them here, the more they hasten the day they are kicked out for betraying those very same principles.

UPDATE (11: 31 P.M. 4/10/05): It appears that increasingly more and more Republicans are beginning to share the very same concerns I have expressed.