WITHOUT DELAY.(The Talk of the Town)(Tom DeLay)

A current Washington joke, in the mordant style that used to be a Moscow specialty, has it that Republicans and Democrats have finally found something they can agree on: Tom DeLay must stay as the Majority Leader of the House of Representatives.

The DeLay Must Stay movement, like all popular fronts and uneasy alliances, brings together participants of varying motives. Republican members want to continue being led by the Texas bug exterminator turned hard-right Christianist crusader because they agree with him on the great political and religious issues of the day; because he is nice to them, feeding them pizza when they have to work late and finding places for the smokers among them to indulge without having to shiver on the Capitol steps; because they are terrified of him, on account of his well-deserved reputation for vengefulness; because he saved them from losing House seats in the 2004 election by persuading Texas to adopt a precedent-breaking mid-decade gerrymander that netted their party an overall gain of three seats; because he has raised millions for their campaigns, mostly from business interests that have reaped billions and expect to reap billions more from the policies he promotes; and because, using threats and inducements, he has insured that the choicest, highest-paying, most enviable lobbying jobs on Washington's K Street corridor go overwhelmingly to Republicans in general and DeLay loyalists in particular. Democrats don't mind if DeLay stays a while, because he is so repellent. Self-righteous, humorless, resentful, scowling, perpetually angry, he has many of the irritating qualities of his former colleague Newt Gingrich without any of the latter's childlike charms. (There are no DeLay equivalents of Gingrich's boyish enthusiasms for dinosaurs, sci-fi fantasies, and big, shiny theories of History.) And then there are the scandals, which cling to the Majority Leader like flakes of dandruff.

DeLay's ethical lapses center on campaign-finance chicanery, with sidelines in petty nepotism and lavish trips to exotic locales near golf courses. The details tend to be numbingly dull--there are no Monicas or burglaries to spice them up--but the lapses themselves are real enough. Last year, three of them attracted the attention of the House ethics committee, which formally (though toothlessly) "admonished" him, making him one of only three representatives, and the only repeat offender, to be disciplined in the past three years. DeLay has since had the three most unreliable Republicans removed and replaced with stooges, and the ethics committee has devolved from torpid to moribund. But various newspapers (not just bastions of the coastal "liberal media" like the Times and the Washington Post but also red-state gazettes like the American Press, of Lake Charles, Louisiana) have continued to make inquiries, as has the (Democratic) district attorney for Austin, Texas, Ronnie Earle, who has already indicted three of DeLay's closest associates and eight of their corporate donors. So far, only one serving Republican congressman--Christopher Shays, of Connecticut--has openly called upon DeLay to give up his leadership post. But cracks are beginning to appear in the outer wall. "delay must go" was the title last week of an editorial in the staunchly Republican Richmond Times-Dispatch. The editorialists of the Wall Street Journal, who last year dismissed ethics criticisms of DeLay as "amusing," now write sternly, "Mr. DeLay, who rode to power in 1994 on a wave of revulsion at the everyday ways of big government, has become the living exemplar of some of its worst habits." The headline on that one was "smells like beltway."

What is most odiferous about DeLay, however, is not his Tammany-like antics but his Torquemada-like ones. The current fuss reached the boiling point on March 31st, when, after the body of Terri Schiavo was allowed to expire, DeLay--in a prepared ...