Goodbye, GOP titan Tom DeLay

In Swedish media, the abrupt resignation of Tom DeLay has not generated any longer articles, in spite of the fact that DeLay has been an important part of the Republican Congressional leadership for more than a decade. The New Dispatch makes the following analysis.

More even than his mentor, Newt Gingrich, DeLay was the architect of a House of Representatives dedicated to the entrenchment of a Republican majority, through means ranging from total exclusion of Democrats from any role in the legislative process, to eager enlistment of GOP ideological and corporate constituencies as active policymakers, to a coldly systematic effort to reward private campaign contributions with lucrative public favors.

Moreover, DeLay was the living link between the drive for brutal efficient Republican institutional power and the more extreme elements of the conservative movement, and especially the Cultural Right. One of the most unsavory aspects of his legacy is the GOP habit of combining regular abuses of power with the rhetoric of self-righteousness and even self-pitying claims of victimization. [...]

Without DeLay, the GOP congressional leadership is now in the final stages of moral decay, pursuing his blueprint for entrenched power even as its architect flees the House and even flees his district to make it possible to remove his name from the ballot. It will take far more than Tom DeLay's departure to reform the Washington culture he once deplored and then epitomized. And Democrats have an unparalleled opportunity and responsibility to make the case for real change.

That last sentence is crucial, and let's hope the US Democrats will start carrying the mantel of reform again -- in this and in other political areas.