The “scandal” surrounding House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) has all the earmarks of a Washington feeding frenzy—which means, in short, that most ordinary Americans couldn’t care less. Financial shenanigans in the Imperial City? I’m shocked, I tell you—shocked! Yet there is a lesson here, albeit not the one the Democrats and other “good government” schoolmarms are wont to draw.
We are told that DeLay had hired members of his family to work on his campaigns. You might argue that this should be illegal, but it isn’t. They all do it, as the Los Angeles Times pointed out: “At least 39 members of Congress have engaged in the controversial practice of paying their spouses, children or other relatives out of campaign funds, or have hired companies in which a family member had a financial interest, records and interviews show. House campaign funds have paid more than $3 million to lawmakers’ relatives over the last two election cycles, records show.”
Next up is the trip to Russia that DeLay took, paid for by the National Center for Public Policy Research, which, the Washington Post assures us, “was underwritten by business interests lobbying in support of the Russian government, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the trip arrangements.”
DeLay avers that...