Josh Marshall carries the Tom DeLay Texas redistricting story forward on why it's similar to the Trent Lott story but why it has yet to get press legs. Interesing points that make sense to me.
There are actually two different "memos" here, each posted to his website yesterday but separated, here, by a time/date stamp. If you read the text in your usual reading order, down, you will be reading the second first. I don't think it matters all that much.
talkingpointsmemo.com
(May 25th, 2003 -- 7:53 PM EDT // link)
Here's another thread of the Tom DeLay/Texas Redistricting story. It hasn't yet gotten much attention. But it played an important role in the lead-up to the confrontation two weeks ago. It has to do with alleged Voting Rights Act violations tied to the DeLay-backed Texas redistricting bill.
Richard Raymond is a Democratic member of the Texas House of Representatives from Laredo. During the time the DeLay-backed redistricting bill was moving through the House, it was in the hands of State Representative Joe Crabb (R-Atascocita), chairman of the Republican-controlled redistricting committee. Raymond charged that in the process of rushing it through the legislative process, Crabb had violated the Voting Rights Act -- the particulars are complicated but they have to do with legal requirements for bilingual notice and comment of changes to legislative districts, and so forth. (Raymond's district is heavily Hispanic.) Raymond made a formal complaint to the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, dated May 7th.
This complaint was at least a complication for moving the redistricting bill through the House, as Texas Republicans were then trying to do.
Now here's where the story gets murky.
Earlier this month DeLay went to Texas to personally lobby for the new redistricting bill. According to Raymond, Republican colleagues of his from the House came to him and told him the following: DeLay had told them and other anxious House Republicans not to worry about Raymond's Voting Rights Act complaint because he had gotten the complaint taken care of at DOJ and it would be quickly dismissed, in time to pass through the redistricting bill. In the words of Raymond's lawyer, Raymond said he had "received reliable information that the normal processes of the Department of Justice for such complaints have been circumvented under pressure from Congressman Tom DeLay of Texas." (To the best of TPM's knowledge, there is no independent evidence of Raymond's charges.)
After this, Raymond withdrew his complaint to the Justice Department, arguing that his constituents could not recieve a fair hearing there, and filed a lawsuit -- making the same claims as the original complaint -- in federal court in Texas.
Last week I asked DeLay spokesman Stuart Roy if there were any truth to Raymond's charges about inappropriate contact between DeLay's office and Justice. He said there was not. Roy said DeLay's office had contacted Justice about Raymond, but only after Raymond publicly charged DeLay with trying to get his complaint dropped. (Still with me? Good.) According to Roy, this contact was strictly for the purpose of ascertaining whether Raymond had filed a formal complaint against DeLay and, if so, why DeLay's office hadn't been notified.
These claims and counter-claims have triggered an acrimonious correspondence between Raymond's attorney and the Justice Department. Copies of three key letters -- including one from Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Ralph F. Boyd, Jr. -- have just been added to the TPM Document Collection.
-- Josh Marshall
(May 25th, 2003 -- 4:36 PM EDT // link)
"This smells, and I'm going to ask Andy Card of the White House to get into this this week, to examine any contacts that any federal officials had with federal departments..."
That's from Joe Lieberman this morning on Fox News Sunday. It's still a tad understated. But at least Lieberman is pushing this issue, which is more than you can say for just about any other politician beside the Democrats in the Texas congressional delegation.
We'll see if Lieberman follows through.
Let's get back to why so few in the press or among pols on the Hill are willing to take DeLay on.
With the pols, I think the answer is fairly straightforward. DeLay's a bully. He threatens and brow-beats people and doesn't give up. Democrats are sadly cowed by him. For people in his own party, DeLay is also a very important conduit of money. So he's not someone you want to cross. (One seldom-discussed part of the state redistricting story is how dependent Republicans in the Texas state House were on DeLay's financial largesse, and how important this was in bringing the crisis to a head.)
Journalists have given DeLay a wide berth for a distinct but related reason. For most of them, the story reeks of what people in the business call dog-bites-man. In other words, it's just not surprising enough to be news. DeLay is widely-known -- even relishes his reputation -- for hardball, envelope-pushing tactics. The exploits of his money and access machine are both legendary and notorious. So, in a sense, where's the story?
This and the Lott debacle are different in many ways. But in this respect they are similar. At least in the first few days, no one gave the Lott situation much attention because pretty much everyone knew that Lott was fairly unreconstructed on racial issues. (After all, only three years before, his close ties to a white-supremacist group had been widely reported in the Washington Post and other papers.) So it really wasn't such a surprise that he thought this way.
DeLay is reaping a similar advantage because of what people in town already know about him. If it were Tom Daschle, and not Tom DeLay, I guarantee the reaction would be quite different. But it's not simply a partisan or bias issue. It wouldn't be the same with Bill Frist or Denny Hastert either. Some of this -- no doubt -- is due to the lack of a Republican mau-mau to stir up interest and push the press to pursue it. But a lot of it is the prism through which journalists themselves are seeing it.
The key here is that DeLay is benefitting greatly from his long-established reputation as someone who hugs the letter of the law while breaking its spirit, it not more, again and again.
How else do you explain the following situation: the House Majority Leader was directly and intimately involved in activities that are now the subject of investigations by two cabinet departments and grand jury proceedings in Texas. Yet Washington is still barely paying the matter any attention. How do you explain that?
-- Josh Marshall |
