Conservatives Without Conscience

had not raised the issue during the 2004 campaign of Bush and Cheney’s excessive secrecy. From those at the top of John Kerry’s presidential campaign staff to several Democratic congressional candidates, I received the same answer: Secrecy is “process,” which they are convinced interests no voters. Robert Kuttner also found Democrats reluctant to make an issue of these antidemocratic and authoritarian tactics. “Democrats are ambivalent about taking this issue to the country or to the press because many are convinced that nobody cares about ‘process’ issues,” Kuttner reported. “The whole thing sounds like inside baseball, or worse, like losers whining.” Yet in 1910, when Speaker Joe Cannon played similar games, Kuttner noted, “it was a very big deal indeed,” and when the press investigated, public outrage toppled him.[25] I know several Republicans who are also troubled by their colleagues’ activities, but as good right-wing authoritarian followers they have remained silent and compliant. And the processes of the House may well spread to the Senate, if Republicans maintain control, because more and more members of the House are being elected to the Senate.

Creating a Permanent Republican Majority

House Republicans have gone beyond raising money from well-heeled conservative sources as a means to better finance their candidates, and beyond rough campaign tactics, to hold their majority status. They have, in effect, literally rigged the system. Today House seats are amazingly secure, because Republicans have designed a strategy to give themselves safe congressional districts; once again Democrats remain silent because they do not want to be seen as whiners, or to raise process issues. When the Congressional Quarterly reported that in 2004, only 29 of 435 House races were truly competitive, and of those only 13 were “really close races,” the Economist declared, “The sheer uncompetitiveness of most House races takes one’s breath away…. In 2002, just four incumbents lost to challengers at the polls (another four lost in primaries). North Korea might be proud of this incumbent re-election rate: 99%.” How did this happen? the Economist inquired. The answer is as old as the nation, but with the use of computers, the process has become much more refined: “By gerrymandering to cram Democrats into a smaller number of super-safe seats [primarily in urban areas] while spreading Republicans into a large number of ‘designer districts’ which they win by 55–60%,” the investigators discovered. They pointed to the “particularly brutal” redistricting engineered by Tom DeLay in Texas, which earned him an indictment for “money laundering,” a serious felony charge under Texas law.[26]

The remarkable audacity DeLay exhibited in his Texas redistricting project—rigging, in effect, the entire state of Texas—enabled Republicans to pick up four additional seats in the House of Representatives. In 2001 DeLay, himself a former member of the Texas state legislature, began plotting a takeover of the Texas “Lege” by Republicans so they could redraw the state’s congressional districts and send more Republicans to Washington. Lou Dubose wrote in the Texas Monthly that DeLay “meant to perpetuate, in one brash swipe, a conservative Republican majority and agenda in the U.S. House until the roosters quit crowing and the sun stayed down.”[27] This was accomplished with the grease of elective politics: money. To win control of the Texas legislature DeLay set up a new political action committee, Texans for a Republican Majority (TRMPAC, known as “trim-pack”), and made himself the chairman of the honorary board. John Colyandro, a longtime associate of Karl Rove’s who was well-known to DeLay, was appointed TRMPAC’s executive director. Americans for a Republican Majority (ARMPAC), another DeLay organization (run by his top political aide, Jim Ellis) contributed $50,000 (or $75,000, according to a few reports) in seed money. Colyandro and Ellis, along with DeLay’s daughter, began raising money from corporations throughout the country: $25,000 from Bacardi USA; $25,000 from Phillip Morris; $25,000 from Sears, Roebuck; and various amounts from countless others having absolutely no business with the Texas legislature but a lot of business with Tom DeLay in Washington. Even the Choctaw Indian tribe of Mississippi, which was represented in Washington by superlobbyist and DeLay friend Jack Abramoff, contributed $6,000. TRMPAC went on to raise $1.5 million during the 2002 campaign cycle, and spent almost all of it on winning control of the Texas legislature. DeLay’s handpicked candidate, Tom Craddick, became Speaker of the Texas House, and in this position would help DeLay redraw the political map of the state. The misstep that returned to haunt this undertaking was that Texas law prohibits corporations from contributing to Texas election campaigns.[*]

Texas Republicans, once in control of the Lege, pushed to enact their redistricting plan, while Democrats employed numerous tactical and procedural moves to try to prevent this. At one point, Democratic legislators left the state in droves to prevent Republicans from obtaining the quorum necessary for enacting gerrymandered districts into law. Tom DeLay called the Federal Aviation Administration and demanded they send airplanes out to locate the missing Democratic legislators, dubbed the “Killer D’s” by the media. [*] The Killer D’s could stall only so long, however, and in 2003 the Texas legislature enacted a new redistricting plan. This action was unprecedented; throughout the twentieth century such redistricting had been undertaken only in response to the decennial U.S. Census’s update of population figures. Much of the negotiation took place behind closed doors, in conference committee, with DeLay brokering the deal and insisting the plan meet his approval. DeLay, who personally carried drafts of the new law back and forth between the Texas House and Senate, resisted any and all attempts to make the plan fair, so determined was he to secure every possible advantage for Republicans.[28]

“By drawing districts that snaked hundreds of miles across various counties,” the NAACP reported, “Republicans drained African American and Latino voters from integrated Democratic districts and replaced them with enough white Republican voters to outnumber remaining white Democratic voters. As a result, DeLay converted a 32-member Texas Congressional delegation that had been evenly divided between the parties into one in which Republicans enjoyed a 10-seat advantage after the 2004 election.”[29] Under the federal Voting Rights Act, Texas was required to submit any changes in its voting laws to the federal government for approval by the Department of Justice. After it sent its 2003 redistricting plan to Washington, five lawyers and two analysts in the department’s Civil Rights Division rejected it in a seventy-three- page memorandum highlighting its flaws. But Bush appointees at the Justice Department rejected the findings of their own experts and approved the highly partisan plan.[30] When opponents of the scheme took it to federal court, they ran aground because of the uncertainty of the law under existing U.S. Supreme Court rulings. It was not until late 2005 that the Supreme Court agreed to hear their objections, which makes it unlikely the issue will be resolved before the 2006 congressional elections. In the past, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court has tried to stay out of such political issues, so it remains uncertain whether the high Court will make a ruling in the case. But everyone should hope that the justices opt to clean up this mess, for its ramifications are national.

Indeed, the actions of DeLay and his allies in the Texas legislature have already encouraged similar activity (so far unsuccessful) in other states controlled by Republicans, namely Georgia and Colorado. In turn, a few Democrats, relying on the adage that “you can’t play touch football when the other guy is playing tackle,” have proposed that states they now control, such as Illinois, New Mexico, and Louisiana, pursue their own partisan redistricting plans. But so far Democrats have chosen to talk, not to play this game. DeLay’s actions in Texas provided less than a handful of additional votes, but Republicans have shown that with their authoritarian style they can and will govern the House, and the nation, with only the slightest majority. [*] They have maintained control of the House by mastering “the one-vote victory” strategy, which DeLay has made into an art form.

Although he is not particularly close to Bush II, since he had been openly critical of his father (claiming that moderate Republicans like Bush I were moral compromisers), DeLay is a team player and recognizes the power of the White House, so he has been more than willing to push Bush administration programs. As majority leader, he knew how to count votes and how to twist arms to enact laws with almost no majority support. “Time and again,” the Washington Post reported, “on high-profile bills involving Medicare, education and other programs, [the GOP leaders] have calibrated the likely yeas and neas to the thinnest margin possible, enabling them to push legislation as much to their liking as they can in a narrowly divided and bitterly partisan House.”[31] For example, the Post reported, the 2003 vote on Medicare was 216–215, the Head Start vote was 217–216, and those in favor of providing vouchers for children in the District of Columbia public schools prevailed with a 209–208 vote. By picking up four more votes from Texas in 2004, Republicans gained even greater control. DeLay—and no doubt his successor, John Boehner—held Republican members of the House in line through threats and money and, by playing hardball, demanded and obtained votes when he needed them. But the leaders are not foolish and understand that some moderate members cannot vote for every hard-right measure and survive in office. So the GOP leadership rotates among the