Richard Reeves: The Fall of Tom DeLay

DeLay is finished but he does not yet realize that, either. He was well-defended by his own as long as he only played bully-boy in the House of Representatives, pushing around Republicans grateful to him helping their careers along with fund-raising and parliamentary manuevering. It even seemed he could weather the ethical storms about his casual purloining of the political funds he raised with great energy and ingenuity. After all, taking trips around the world from lobbyists and putting his wife and daughter on the payroll were not exactly his own inventions. But taking on the judiciary -- his reaction to court inaction in the sad case of the life and death Terri Schiavo -- is a bit over his pay grade. Even Franklin D. Roosevelt failed when he tried to bring the judiciary to heel by “packing” the Supreme Court, adding liberals to neutralize the conservative majority created by Republican presidents earlier in the century.