April 3, 2006

DeLay gives up!

The NYT reports:
Rep. Tom DeLay will announce on Tuesday that he will not seek re-election and will leave Congress within months, according to congressional aides.
Shocking!

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

Love it....see, msm IS good for something.

Eli Blake said...

Won't help his party though. Nick Lampson is a pretty well connected former congressman who represented about a quarter of the district in the past, and when DeLay redrew the districts, he 'generously' accepted a relatively high number of Democrats in his own. Lampson has already raised a ton of money so even if the Republicans find a candidate they will start out way behind Lampson.

Wade Garrett said...

Good riddance is right. Russian Oil contributions, misuse of federal investigative agencies, perjury, Jack Abramoff, smoking Cubar cigars, the college nickname "Hot Tub Tom" . . . all of that in the name of making the United States a "God centered" nation. I don't know what scares me more, the fact that Tom DeLay was once the third most powerful man in the United States, or the thought that millions of Americans believe that a loving God would support his policies.

Jinnmabe said...

If gleeful gloating were popcorn, tonight and tomorrow would be heaven for me.

MadisonMan said...

Who will be the next Republican legislator to resign in disgrace? Don't these things always come in threes?

Paging Representative Ney. Paging Representative Ney...

The Drill SGT said...

I've never been a DeLay fan. Too much of an odor of partisan politics for me, however, I'm extremely disappointed at the biased headline that I see in my morning paper today. WaPo

DeLay to Resign From Congress

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/04/AR2006040400513.html

I'm sorry, but when a Member leaves Congress there are a number of verbs that can be used, and "resign" isn't what he's doing. It demonstrates to me that my paper has either an agenda here or bad editing, and neither pleases me.

RESIGN: what you do mid-term, requires a special election

Opt not to seek another term: what DeLay is doing

RETIRE: What the press says if you opt out of running and they like you. In fact DeLay I expect has the tenure in Congress to honestly call it retirement, He's 59 after all.

MadisonMan said...

Opt not to seek another term: what DeLay is doing

It's my understanding that he's leaving in June. That's leaving early, i.e. resigning, not opting not to seek reelection.

The Drill SGT said...

MadisonMan,

I stand corrected after reading the TIME interview


TIME: What are your immediate plans? Could you talk to me about the timeline?

DeLay: I'm going to announce tomorrow (Tuesday) that I'm not running for reelection and that I'm going to leave Congress sometime—I haven't figured out because I have some things to do, to finish. I'm working very hard on the President's vision for NASA and that's incredibly important for the nation, as well as this district. I'm working on some district things. I hope to get through those things as fast as possible. But it'll take a couple months. So I don't know exactly the date. I'll probably come up with a date in the next couple weeks.

TIME: Less than 60 days? Sometime in May?

DeLay:Probably the end of May. But it depends on the Congressional schedule. As far as what happens with my spot on the ballot: The state Republican executive committee will go to work and I will move to Virginia. The state Republican election committee will pick someone to run on this ballot.

TIME: What is it about the law that makes your moving to Virginia important?

DeLay:I become ineligible to run for election if I'm not a resident of the state of Texas.

TIME: Where in Virginia?

I'm Full of Soup said...

I say good ridddance too. He is a sleazeball. So this is good.

But a good deal of wind just went out of the Democrats sails! And that is good too!

Lastlt, I bet there is no way his district goes democrat.

The Drill SGT said...

Al,

Actually there is a chance. In that mid-term redistricting, DeLay sliced some Rep's from his district to help gerry,ander adjacent ones.

Goatwhacker said...

Adios Tom, don't let the door hit you in the butt. You pretended to be a small-government guy but turned into representing the worst excesses of large government.

I don't think this will let much wind out of the Democrats' sails, though. As opposed to the nineties where they focused mostly on demonizing Newt Gingrich, they now spread their demonization much more widely.

Wade Garrett said...

INMA - That's hilarious! The blogosphere needs more clever Monty Python references!

Laura Reynolds said...

DeLay is not a principled conservative so there are lots of good riddances to go around. He was a classic big government type, a Republican Jim Wright, a lightening rod, so I am glad to see him go. Maybe he can go to the same slammer as Rostenkowski and Trafficant.

MadisonMan said...

Maybe he can go to the same slammer as Rostenkowski

I don't want him in Wisconsin, thankyouverymuch, although maybe if he were imprisoned here, like Rostenkowski, then all the Wisconsin Republican politicians who benefited from Delay's largesse -- and who were strangely silent regarding Delay's dubious ethics -- could more easily visit.

Palladian said...

Good riddance to the angry little bug killer.

I think we should cull sleazeballs in pairs, one from each party. Maybe McKinney will be the Democrat to go next, though I don't know that she's the same kind of sleazeball that DeLay is. She might just be ideologically loathesome but not corrupt. But who knows? Is it possible to get elected to high office and not be a sleazeball of some kind?