[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 16]
[House]
[Pages 22438-22439]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                       TOM DeLAY'S HOUSE OF SHAME

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Schmidt). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan) is 
recognized for the remaining time until midnight.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity for us 
to just grab a few more minutes here and finish up, the 30-something 
working group that we have here, and we want to kind of end the 
conversation tonight talking a little bit about a recent periodical 
that we like to call Newsweek. It is about the power outage. And we 
have mentioned a couple of words here tonight, competence or lack 
thereof, and cronyism.
  Now, we like, at the 30-something working group, to get third party 
validators. And here on the cover of Newsweek, GOP, a mounting crisis 
of competence and cronyism, which I think is exactly what we have been 
talking about here tonight.
  Madam Speaker, I would like to submit for the Record an article here, 
Tom DeLay's House of Shame, by Jonathan Alter.
  Before yielding to the gentleman, I would like to just share a little 
bit a couple of the quotes. I want to share a couple of quotes from 
this article today or this week. This gentleman is saying, Mr. Alter is 
saying that historians will regard this as the single most corrupt 
decade in the long and colorful history of the House of 
Representatives. That is pretty sad. And that Congress has always had 
its share of extremists, but the DeLay era is the first time the fringe 
has ever been in charge. And when we talked about Katrina, we talked 
about trying to implement this extremist agenda, regardless of what the 
circumstances are, and using Katrina as an opportunity to implement 
this agenda. I want to just share one more quote before we open it up 
here of what then House majority leader Mr. DeLay said after the 
hurricanes, and I quote, that Katrina and Rita ``introduced a valuable 
forum to promote the triumph of our ideas and solutions for government 
over the crumbling and outdated policies of the Democratic controlled 
Congress of past decades.'' The crumbling or the triumph of our ideas. 
Triumph of our ideas. I mean, let's just look at where we are right 
now. Triumph of the Republican ideas? What? Increased poverty? Stagnant 
wages? Health care going up by 15 to 20 percent a year? Pharmaceutical 
costs going up by 20 percent a year. What triumph of ideas?
  Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Do not forget the deficit.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. A deficit, $500 billion? Now that is not even 
factoring in the war, a war that we got ram-rodded into, lied into. Is 
that the great triumph of ideas?
  Mr. MEEK of Florida. Mr. Ryan, where are we getting the money from?
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. We are borrowing it from China. We do not even have 
the money.
  Mr. MEEK of Florida. Saudi Arabia, too. Do not leave them out.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And how many years the majority said about the 
Democratic controlled Congress tax and spend, tax and spend, tax and 
spend. Well, the last 10 years and the last 5 years in particular, 
borrow and spend. We are borrowing the money from China, Japan, Saudi 
Arabia, a lot of people who do not have really friendly interests with 
the United States of America. And the problem is, we have got to pay 
interest on the money we are borrowing. Reckless fiscal policy, 
incompetence, corruption, cronyism, time and time and time again.

                       Tom DeLay's House of Shame

                          (By Jonathan Alter)

       A decade ago, I paid a call on Tom Delay in his Ornate 
     office in the Capitol. I had heard a rumor about him that I 
     figured could not possibly be true. The rumor was that after 
     the GOP took control of the House that Year, DeLay had begun 
     keeping a little black book with the names of Washington 
     lobbyists who wanted to come see him. If the lobbyists were 
     not Republicans and contributors to his power base, they 
     didn't get into ``the people's House.'' DeLay not only 
     confirmed the story, he showed me the book. His time was 
     limited, DeLay explained with a genial smile. Why should he 
     open his door to people who were not on the team?
       Thus began what historians will regard as the single most 
     corrupt decade in the long and colorful history of the House 
     of Representatives. Come on, you say. How about all those 
     years when congressmen accepted cash in the House chamber and 
     then staggered onto the floor drunk? Yes, special interests 
     have bought off members of Congress at least since Daniel 
     Webster took his seat while on the payroll of a bank. And 
     yes, Congress over the years has seen dozens of sex scandals 
     and dozens of members brought low by financial improprieties. 
     But never before has the leadership of the House been 
     hijacked by a small band of extremists bent on building a 
     ruthless shakedown machine, lining the pockets of their 
     richest constituents and rolling back popular protections for 
     ordinary people. These folks borrow like banana republics and 
     spend like Tip O'Neill on speed.
       I have no idea if DeLay has technically broken the law. 
     What interests me is how this moderate, evenly divided nation 
     came to be ruled on at least one side of Capitol Hill by a 
     zealot. This is a man who calls the Environmental Protection 
     Agency ``the Gestapo of government'' and favors repealing the 
     Clean Air Act because ``it's never been proven that air 
     toxins are hazardous to people''; who insists repeatedly that 
     judges on the other side of issues ``need to be intimidated'' 
     and rejects the idea of a separation of church and state; who 
     claims there are not parents trying to raise families on the 
     minimum wage--that ``fortunately, such families no not 
     exist'' (at least Newt Gingrich was intrigued by the 
     challenges of poverty); who once said: ``A woman can't take 
     care of

[[Page 22439]]

     the family. It takes a man to provide structure.'' I could go 
     on all day. Congress has always had its share of extremists. 
     But the DeLay era is the first time the fringe has ever been 
     in charge.
       The only comparison to DeLay & Co. might be the Radical 
     Republicans of the 1860s. But the 19th-century Radical 
     Republican agenda was to integrate and remake the South. The 
     21st-century Radical Republican agenda is to enact the wish 
     list of the tobacco and gun lobbies, repeal health and safety 
     regulations and spend billions on shameless pork-barrel 
     projects to keep the GOP at the trough. Another analogy is to 
     Republican Speaker Joe Cannon, who ran the House with an iron 
     fist a century ago. But Cannon had to contend with 
     Progressive Republicans who eventually stripped him of his 
     power. DeLay's ruling radical conservative claque remains 
     united, at least for now.
       Comparisons with fellow Texan Sam Rayburn fall short, too. 
     Rayburn was respected on both sides of the aisle for his 
     rock-solid integrity. He and most other House speakers 
     carefully balanced their support for corporate interests like 
     the oil depletion allowance with at least some sense of 
     public good. And they had to share much of their power with 
     committee chairmen. Today, seniority is much less important. 
     Chairmen are term-limited (six years) or tossed if they 
     displease DeLay. And this crowd views ``the public interest'' 
     as strictly for liberal pantywaists.
       How have they succeeded? A new book ``Off Center: The 
     Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American 
     Democracy,'' by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, explains 
     how the GOP is simply better than the Democratic Party at the 
     basic blocking and tackling of politics, including the 
     exploitation of cultural and religious issues. The authors 
     argue that even if DeLay goes down, the zealotry and 
     corporate shilling will continue as long as the GOP controls 
     the House. Consider DeLay's temporary replacement, Missouri 
     Rep. Roy Blunt. The Washington Post reported last week that 
     Blunt is respected by Republican members in part because he 
     has ``strong ties to the Washington lobbying community.'' 
     That's a qualification for office?
       The only reason the House hasn't done even more damage is 
     that the Senate often sands down the most noxious ideas, 
     making the bills merely bad, not disastrous. What next for 
     the House of Shame? If DeLay's acquitted, he'll be back in 
     power. If he's convicted, his proteges will continue his 
     work. Reform efforts by fiscal conservatives determined to 
     curb their borrow-and-spend colleagues are probably doomed. 
     The only way to get rid of the termites eating away the 
     people's House is to stamp them out at the next election.

  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I would be happy to yield to the gentlewoman from 
Florida (Ms. Wasserman Schultz).
  Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Madam Speaker, and yet they are still, in the 
aftermath of Katrina, in the aftermath of Rita, with ballooning 
deficits and horrific corruption and cronyism, still talking about tax 
cuts, making the tax cuts permanent. They are still talking about 
budget reconciliation, which is Washington speak for cuts. They are 
still talking about not providing what people in this country, in the 
middle, in the middle, the average hardworking American needs.
  You know, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan) is absolutely right. It 
is the fringe that has been governing this institution, and this 
country for the last 10 years. Most of us are mainstream. Most people 
consider themselves very middle of the road, moderate, not left, not 
right, just middle of the road, and they want the course to generally 
be steering in an almost straight path, not veering in one direction or 
another, and most definitely, not favoring one group over another. This 
leadership has clearly favored the privileged, and it is not like, 
there is no question about that; that is documented fact. The 
privileged, they are first in line to get theirs. And you know, if we 
can throw some crumbs to the people who are average everyday Americans, 
then you know that is fine, too.
  But we have got to make sure that we get back to the competence that 
we need to run this government. We have to rid this government of the 
cronyism and the corruption, and we have got to restore the fourth C 
which is the American people's confidence.
  Mr. MEEK of Florida. I have had very little to say in this condensed 
time that we have. I think it is important for us to make sure that 
folks are not just, Members are not just watching thinking that we are 
going, just coming out of the sky with this stuff. We gave it at the 
WashingtonPost.com. We also said, if you wanted to cosponsor on House 
Resolution 3764, which is a bill that we have put forth to be about the 
solution, making sure that we can head off a lack of governance, not 
paying attention to the things that we need to pay attention to.
  One thing about Katrina, Madam Speaker, and Rita was the fact that we 
are not ready to respond to a catastrophic event here in the United 
States. And I can tell you that our military is ready, but the question 
is, are our American leaders ready to respond? Do we have what we need 
to have in place as it relates to the management?
  And if you want to cosign on this independent commission, that I must 
say to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan) that we talked about before, 
81 percent of the polls show that Americans want to see an independent 
commission, you can sign on to this bill just as a regular U.S. 
citizen, HouseDemocrats.gov/Katrina.
  With that, I say to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan) that we have a 
lot of work here to do. No one is saying that anyone is guilty or 
whatever the case may be because we know that there will be a court of 
law that that will take plays and on behalf of the institution, I hope 
all works well as it relates to democracy prevailing.
  But I will tell you that it is important, and it is embarrassing to 
be a Member of the 109th Congress with this cloud over this 
institution. And people are going to look at, they do not care. They 
look at you as a Member of the House, not as a Democrat or a Republican 
or the one independent that we have here in this House. They look at us 
as stewards of this democracy that people have died for us to have the 
opportunity.
  And I yield back to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan).
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Well, I am just going to wrap up here in the final, 
unless the gentlewoman has any final comments.
  Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. No, I was just going to suggest that you give 
out the website. And we always encourage people who watch us each week 
to contact us, give us your thoughts and opinions and please let 
Members know.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. It is a little late tonight. If you are still up, 
[email protected]. Send us some e-mails. We have been 
getting some really great ones, and a lot of them lately.

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