Why DeLay Isn’t Coming Back

To hear former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay explain it, there was never any real chance he would jump back into the race for his old seat from Texas’s 22nd congressional district, even after the state Republican party lost its legal bid to field a new candidate in his place. “Nothing has changed,” he told me in a telephone interview Wednesday. “Nothing has changed as far as why I made the decision I made to get out of Congress and announce that I was not going to run.” So on Tuesday, after Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia slammed the door on the Texas GOP case, DeLay, out of Congress and now a resident of Virginia, issued a statement saying he would simply remove his name from the ballot. His decision, he said, “was and is irrevocable.”

But it wasn’t quite that simple. Before he made up his mind, DeLay commissioned a poll of voters in the 22nd District. “My negatives were still high,” he told me, even though he retained a sizable core of strong supporters. The poll also found that several other Republican candidates would have a better chance against Democrat Nick Lampson. Even though DeLay believed he could still win if he mounted a vigorous campaign, the poll reinforced his belief that getting out was the right thing to do.

But his departure leaves questions. I asked him about critics who accuse him of being selfish for going through the Republican primary last March, defeating rival GOP candidates, and then pulling out of the race. “I don’t think it was selfish at all,” DeLay answered, explaining that he was caught between the requirements of running for office and dealing with his indictment, by the controversial Travis County, Texas prosecutor Ronnie Earle, on campaign-finance charges. “The political schedule didn’t match the legal schedule. When it was time to decide whether I was running for reelection or not, it was December [2005]. I was under indictment, and I was led to believe I could get to trial and have this indictment disposed of before the election, and possibly have it disposed of in January or February. I had to file [for reelection] because there was a filing deadline. So I filed, totally expecting that I would stay as Majority Leader after I had disposed of the indictment.”

But it didn’t work out that way. As the months passed, the Earle case dragged on, and some of his former top aides were charged in the Jack Abramoff investigation, DeLay told me, “it was obvious that it was in the best interests of the House for me to step aside as Majority Leader.” But after he stepped aside, he said, “I still had a primary to run.” DeLay said that one reason he felt it was important that he stay in the primary was that the other candidates who were in the race “were people who should not represent the 22nd District.”

So DeLay stayed in. He won the primary with 62 percent of the vote. Some supporters thought that was an impressive win, but DeLay was troubled. “People gave me a lot of credit for 62 percent,” he told me a few months ago. “But for a 21-year incumbent, 62 percent — I mean, it’s good, but it should have been 70-percent-plus. Sixty-two percent means 38 percent voted against me.” Not long after the primary, DeLay commissioned a poll that showed his standing in his district had deteriorated significantly. “The poll showed, basically, that I had a 50-50 chance of winning,” he said. So DeLay began to contemplate leaving the race. He looked at what had happened in New Jersey in 2002, when Sen. Robert Torricelli, facing ethics charges, pulled out of the race just 33 days before Election Day. Even though the deadline for withdrawal had passed, Democrats were allowed to replace Torricelli with another candidate, Frank Lautenberg, who won the Senate seat. In his own case, DeLay told me, he believed Texas law allowed him to leave the race and have the Republican party replace him on the ballot.

DeLay relied on a distinction between being ineligible for a race and withdrawing from a race. “There are two Texas laws, one for ineligibility and one for withdrawing,” he told me yesterday. “You can be declared ineligible if you die, or if you have a terminal illness, or if you are convicted of a felony, or if you move to another state. And that ineligibility means the party can replace you on the ballot. If you withdraw, they cannot replace you on the ballot. The courts never got the difference.”

No, they didn’t. Since DeLay announced that he was moving to Virginia — “I moved there because that’s where my future is” — he believed he had become ineligible. But courts up to the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected DeLay’s arguments, and then Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who handles such matters for the Fifth Circuit, rejected DeLay’s argument in a matter of hours. I asked DeLay if he had a problem with Scalia’s handling of the case. “Yes, I do,” DeLay said. “He obviously spent no time looking at what’s happening in the court in which he has oversight. Within three hours, he denied this stay.”

“You can always count on the judiciary to make stupid rulings,” DeLay told me. “Not only stupid, but dangerous.”

After Scalia’s decision, DeLay faced another dilemma. As the issue was working its way through the courts, he had hinted that if he was forced to stay on the ballot, then he might resume the race for reelection. You Democrats want me to run? Well, you’ll get what you want. But with the reality of the court decisions, DeLay had to make a decision of his own. And that is when, last week, he took another poll. “It showed that nothing had changed since I made the decision right after the primary,” DeLay told me. “My negatives were still high. The polling showed that I probably had a 50-50 chance.”

But DeLay’s name wasn’t the only one on the poll. The survey also explored the chances of other possible Republican candidates for his seat. It asked about Harris County judge Robert Echols, Sugar Land mayor David Wallace (who yesterday declared his write-in candidacy), and a few others. “All of them tested better than me,” DeLay told me. And all of them, DeLay believed, had a chance to defeat Democratic candidate Nick Lampson. “This is still a Republican district, and will vote for a Republican over Nick Lampson.”

But at this point, the only way a Republican candidate will be on the ballot is as a write-in. “The poll shows that a write-in is doable, that it’s not impossible,” DeLay told me. “Certainly it’s an uphill battle, but it is doable.”

“Doable” is not the most optimistic assessment one might make, so I asked if DeLay is confident that a Republican will be elected. “No, I didn’t say that,” he told me. “I said that people in the 22nd District deserve a choice.”

“So are you confident?” I asked again.

“I’m not confident that I would win,” DeLay answered.

Now, however, it’s certain that DeLay won’t be on the ballot, and that he has left the House for good. He’s convinced things have worked out for the best. “Things are going very well,” he told me. “I still maintain a strong support across the nation.” He cited enthusiastic receptions for his appearances at concerts sponsored by radio host Sean Hannity. “The response and acceptance…were overwhelming,” DeLay said. Compare that, he said, to where he would be had he stayed in reduced circumstances in the House. “I was a back bench member of the Appropriations Committee, locked into a reelection race in Sugar Land, Texas,” DeLay said — not an enticing prospect for a man who had been one of the most powerful on Capitol Hill.

So now, after this week’s decision, DeLay is finally past the House. He’s working on a number of projects, chief of which is a book that will be part memoir, part prescription for what ails contemporary conservatism. Tentatively titled No Retreat, No Surrender: The American Passion of Tom DeLay, it will be out sometime next year.

And in the end, the outlines of what happened in the DeLay case are becoming clearer. Contrary to the widespread belief in Washington, DeLay’s actions do not appear to have been driven by events in the Abramoff investigation. “I have received no subpoenas, no inquiry,” he told me. “They have said publicly that I am not a target of the investigation.” Instead, it was the indictment by Ronnie Earle that brought down DeLay and re-shaped his future. Texas Republicans have long believed that Earle wanted to run DeLay out of the House, and he succeeded.

But DeLay is happy, he told me. “The decision I made back when I decided to leave Congress is still good,” he said. “How can I be effective in pushing the conservative cause? I can be more effective outside of Congress than inside.”

– Byron York, NR’s White House correspondent, is the author of the book The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: The Untold Story of How Democratic Operatives, Eccentric Billionaires, Liberal Activists, and Assorted Celebrities Tried to Bring Down a President — and Why They’ll Try Even Harder Next Time.