The perfect response to accusations that "leftist organizations" are attacking Tom DeLay. Pay attention. Take a lesson.
MR. RUSSERT: Democrats seem to be rejoicing on this. In fact, here's a quote in USA Today. Quoting one Barney Frank: "Democrats think they can make DeLay an issue that costs Republican seats in next year's elections. `Democrats have gone from being frustrated that people weren't paying enough attention to DeLay to being afraid he's going be thrown out too soon.'"
REP. FRANK: Yeah, this is a very, very different issue. As I said, this is not a case of just peccadillos. We're not talking about travel only, about, you know, the bed was too soft or the golf was too frequent. We're talking about a whole approach to public policy, and we think that this illustrates, this very distorted approach to public policy that we've seen.
You know, Mr. Blunt mentioned, well, we passed the highway bill, and he's taking credit for that. The highway bill was supposed to have been passed last year. It expired. If you talk to anybody who's in the business of trying to build highways of plan highways, they're terribly frustrated this Republican Congress has held it up so much. They have held it up because the president, because of his other priorities, has insisted on holding highway spending and public transportation spending far below what even the Republican leaders in the Congress have thought was necessary. But, yeah, it is true. We do think that Mr. DeLay is symptomatic of a corruption, frankly, of the public policy process. That's more important to me than a question of this or that trip or this or that payment to this or that relative, etc. It's the public policy process.
You saw it the Schiavo case, you see it in this assault on the judges. What we have got are people who campaigned in 1994 as reformers, and they were going change things. And in area after area after area, Mr. Blunt made that clear. In 1997, they reformed the ethics process. They have now de-reformed it. They have shut down the debate in the House of Representatives and in public policy terms, they're using that. He talked about some of the things that have come up.
Well, there are other issues that we would like to see come up on the floor of the House. The health care for veterans. You know, they didn't just dump Mr. Hefley as chairman of the Ethics Committee, they dumped Chris Smith from New Jersey, as chairman of the Veterans Committee. His term hadn't expired, in terms of his length--because he had been fighting hard for veterans benefits. So, yeah, we do think that Mr. DeLay's grip on the Republican Party and the extreme right-wing position that he has articulated and used that grip to enforce are legitimate campaign issues. That's what politics is all about.
MR. RUSSERT: You're trying to make Tom DeLay a poster boy?
REP. FRANK: No. Tom DeLay made Tom DeLay a poster boy. I was trying--yes, I did think for years that Tom DeLay's influence as a very, very right-wing guy, who sincerely believes it by the way. I don't think this is a man who's out to line his pockets. He happens to believe very sincerely. I think, you know, he gets carried away. He, himself, admitted that when he kind of threatened judges with retribution, that that was a word he shouldn't have said. But, yeah, we have been trying to get across to people that while there are some moderate-sounding Republicans, the heart of the Republican Party is this extremely conservative group that dominates. And Mr. DeLay, I guess in part because of the Schiavo situation and his prominence there when they tried to order the federal courts to do something, and they are now, by the way--and I think this is relevant--the Republicans are threatening all kinds of action against these liberal judges, who include of course Justices Scalia and Thomas and Rehnquist. Yeah, I think it is very healthy for the country to understand who the Republicans really are and who they really are.
