(HOST) Last week, the former Republican House Majority leader Tom DeLay was convicted on felony charges of conspiracy and money laundering by a Texas jury. This morning commentator and veteran ABC News correspondent Barrie Dunsmore explains the significance of this verdict.
(DUNSMORE) It’s a measure of the transitory nature of fame, or infamy that for many Americans Tom DeLay is the slightly over-weight geezer who showed up last season on "Dancing with the Stars." In fact, less than a decade ago, DeLay was one of the most powerful men in the country- and certainly the man who controlled the United States Congress.
Delay reduced the role of the Democratic minority in the House to nothingness. He demanded, and received tens of millions of dollars in corporate donations – and he repaid his major donors with front row seats at the table when legislation that affected them was being drawn up. For instance the pharmaceutical companies basically wrote the prescription drug benefit legislation and DeLay jammed in through -at one point keeping the House in session throughout the night while he roughly twisted enough Republican arms to get the last few votes.
DeLay was notorious for publicly accepting the perks of corporate lobbyists – whether it was being a frequent flyer on their jets or going on exotic junkets to play golf on some of the world’s great courses – under the pretext of doing "the people’s" business.
This extraordinary hubris was ultimately DeLay’s undoing as majority leader. But it was really only the back drop for his Texas trial. He was actually nailed for breaking a Texas law that prohibits the use of corporate funds in its state elections.
DeLay was accused of taking $190,000 he received from corporate donors in Washington, and transferring it to Texas to elect enough Republicans to control the state legislature. This would give them power over the next re-districting of Congressional seats – and so add several more Texas Republicans to the federal House. It worked – except for that small matter of it being against Texas state law.
Next week, a judge will decide how much prison time, if any, DeLay will have to serve. It could be several years, but it probably won’t be. And there will be an appeal. However, the real significance of this trial is that it lifted the curtain on what is the mother’s milk of Washington politics – the corrupting nature of corporate fundraising and political influence peddling.
One of the telling moments in the trial was the prosecution’s use of a Thomas Jefferson letter written in 1816. In Jefferson’s words, "I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government."
That particular Founding Father obviously did not believe corporations have the same freedom of speech rights as human beings. Yet the five conservatives on the current Supreme Court, who usually pretend fealty to the Founders, earlier this year overturned a century of decided law to give corporations precisely that right. In so doing they opened the gates to unlimited corporate cash in national elections. Tom DeLay’s story dramatically illustrates just how much all that cash corrupts democracy- even when there are some rules. Now there are virtually none.
(TAG) You can find more commentaries by Barrie Dunsmore at VPR-dot-net.