The Hammer Falls

Rep. Tom Delay, persecuted Christian and poster boy for GOP corruption, is going to leave Congress.

Time.com has all the exciting details-

Rep. Tom DeLay, whose iron hold on the House Republicans melted as a lobbying corruption scandal engulfed the Capitol, told TIME that he will not seek reelection and will leave Congress within months...

Gosh, this couldn't be connected to all your former staffers and friends quickly becoming convicted felons as the Department of Justice works its way up to you, could it?

Not only he is leaving Congress... he's leaving the state of Texas!

DeLay said he is likely to leave by the end of May, depending on the Congressional schedule and finishing his work on a couple of issues. He said he will change his legal residence to his condominium in Alexandria, Va., from his modest two-story home on a golf course here in the 22nd District of Texas. "I become ineligible to run for election if I'm not a resident of the state of Texas," he said, turning election law to his purposes for perhaps on last time. State Republican officials will then be able to name another Republican candidate to face Democrat Nick Lampson, a former House members who lost his seat in a redistricting engineered by DeLay.

Said blueduck37, "Delay becomes ineligible to run for election if he's a criminal, a religious nutjob, and a disgrace to his country."

Considering there was no indication (publically anyway) that he was changing his reelection plans until this week, I think we can safely assume this decision was made over the weekend for one of two reasons (or maybe both)... The first is probably that polling indicated Delay was unlikely to win reelection. Even Delay's gerrymandering rape of Texas' congressional districts wasn't going to save him.

The second (and more important) reason is the aforementioned criminal investigation(s). Considering recent events, Delay and his lawyers were likely less confident about his ability to walk away from all of this. And after Duke Cunningham, the GOP cannot afford to have another sitting member of Congress go down. So Delay takes one for the team and walks away. This allows the Republicans to place a more marketable candidate in the seat in hopes that voters will be stupid enough to look at the corruption and criminality in a Delay vacuum and not see that the stink is coming from the party itself. So will they be stupid enough? Well, I would assume not, but we must wait until November to see the conclusion of that saga. Stay tuned, folks!

This shows that for all the right-wing's bravado about runaway liberal prosecutors, phony charges, media bias, and imminent reelection victory for Republicans in November, the truth is more powerful than spin. Mr. Delay is in big, big trouble. And the GOP is too. They're all scared and it's starting to show. They'll spend the next 6-7 months on a PR blitz to prove otherwise, but the facts are coming in at an alarming rate (it's been non-stop bad news/indictments for them since the Fall). Remember- people like Duke Cunningham and Jack Abramoff and Tom Delay weren't just random Republicans. They were the heart and soul of the GOP power machine.

Good riddance to them all.

[PS- PowerLine laments Delay's fall. His only problem, according to Hinderaker? Delay was "too liberal". (*head explodes*) ]