Conservatives Without Conscience

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]