Posts Tagged ‘Tom DeLay’

Justice at Justice?

August 18th, 2010 by John Feehery

Eric Holder, U.S. Attorney General

It has been a bad couple of weeks for the Justice Department.

Yesterday, Rod Blagojevich outfoxed U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and tied up a jury, escaping 23 out of 24 counts.

Earlier in the week, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay announced that he was no longer a target of a Justice Department investigation.

Last week, there was renewed scrutiny over a botched effort by the Public Integrity Section to convict former Senator Ted Stevens of corruption after he perished in a tragic plane accident.  In every obituary, there was further reminder of an almost comical effort to throw Stevens in jail by prosecutors who were so inept and so corrupt themselves that the Judge threw out the case and turned his attention on prosecuting the prosecutors.

It is hard to say if Fitzgerald’s case was inherently weak or if Blago’s public relations efforts were incredibly powerful.  But it is easy to see that Mr. Fitzgerald sees himself in overly dramatic terms as a latter day Eliot Ness, and that his case was too nakedly political and some say too rushed to get the Illinois governor really nailed to the wall.  Read more...

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No cash, no campaigns

May 18th, 2010 by John Feehery

Enron Complex / Photo credit: Alex (http://budurl.com/nwem)

Originally posted at http://thehill.com/opinion/op-ed/98251-no-cash-no-campaigns

It has become an almost weekly ritual, especially in the Age of Obama.

A major corporation, let’s say Goldman Sachs or British Petroleum, or in days past, Enron or Halliburton, gets into some hot water politically.

The inevitable committee hearings are called, and the major executives of said corporations are brought before the assorted members of Congress and publicly flogged to the satisfaction of the representatives’ staffs and family members and to the titillation of national media.

And as the flogging commences, inevitably, the congressional committees of one side or the other publicly demand representatives return the campaign contributions from the corporations that were publicly flogged.

This same thing happens when a member of Congress gets into legal trouble. It happened to Tom DeLay, to Mark Foley, and to Charlie Rangel and John Murtha. The money they gave to their colleagues is suddenly tainted and must be returned — or else.

The irony is that the campaign committees, usually the ones who are calling for the campaign money to be returned, wouldn’t survive without these campaign contributions.  Read more...

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Posted in Fundraising, Government, Politics, Theory, election | No Comments »

Life is Complicated For Speaker Pelosi

March 6th, 2010 by John Feehery

The resignation of Congressman Eric Massa complicates the life of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.  And her life is already pretty complicated.

Of course, it means one less vote for a health care bill that Congressional Democrats are trying to get through a reluctant House.

And one vote is a big deal, because it looks like pro-life Democrats aren’t going to swallow what the Senate passed late last year.

The Democrats have constructed a complicated scheme to pass health care, overly complicated in my view.  The House has to somehow pass a Senate bill that includes a huge new tax increase on labor union health plans and abortion language that is still unacceptable to Bart Stupak.

Then they are going to pass another follow-on bill that will somehow reverse that labor union tax with so-called “reconciliation” instructions that the Senate then will theoretically take up and pass with 51 votes.

But first, the Senate has to hope that the Senate parliamentarian decides that whatever the House passes somehow fits in with the Senate rules, not a certain proposition.

And if the Parliamentarian decides that it is not kosher, well, then, Joe Biden has to step in and create a new precedent that will give the Republicans ample cause to shut the Upper Chamber down for a while.  Read more...

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Posted in Government, Politics, Scandals, election | No Comments »

The Squishes, The Right Wing Wackos and the Republican Majority

June 17th, 2008 by John Feehery

This orginally appeared in The Politico

 

In 1989, when I started working for then-House Minority Leader Bob Michel, I was full of ideological enthusiasm. Fresh off of reading “The Fountainhead” and listening to Newt Gingrich’s GOPAC tapes, I was, in my mind, a fire-breathing conservative who became a bitter critic of George Bush the First and his Big Government ideas. I thought of myself as the most conservative member of the Michel leadership staff. Some thought I was a right-wing wacko.

After I had worked for five years for Michel, a war hero and one of the best leaders in congressional history, he announced his retirement. I decided to go back home to Illinois, where I worked for Denny Hastert, a loyal lieutenant of Michel. Hastert curiously became the campaign manager of Tom DeLay, a bitter critic of Michel who was running for Republican whip.

DeLay, with Hastert’s considerable help, won the whip race as Republicans captured the House for the first time in 40 years. I moved back to Washington to work for then-Majority Whip DeLay and Hastert, his chief deputy. I eventually became DeLay’s communications director.  Read more...

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Posted in Theory | 1 Comment »