Look at Newt Gingrich in the 1990s... over 500+ ethics complaints filed against him (over 400 in a single year) and he was found guilty of no wrong-doing in all but one of them. That doesn't make the one incident any less serious; but when it takes you 500 rounds to hit your target, you must not have had much of a target to begin with.
1) He set up a NON-POLITICAL fund raising machine and then secretly funneled the money into the 2004 campaigns for Republican state senators and reps, including that of a corrupt rep who lost to a crappy Democratic candidate solely because of his corruption alone was so overwhelming.
First, Texas law allows campaign donations of that type to be used for administrative functions. The question at issue is whether throwing a party for people who donate constitutes an administrative function. The Travis County prosecutor that indicted Delay is a member of the same county Democrat organization as Bill Burkett (forged CBS document guy) and has indicted other prominent Republicans such as Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson in the past to no effect.
Campaign law is a cloudy issue at best and I am willing to let the lawyers fight that one out; but as far as I can see no one has proved Delay did anything illegal. I'd also be loathe to call throwing parties "overwhelming corruption".
2) A group of Texan investors, key Delay supporters, screwed a group of Native-Americans out of millions of dollars on the promise that they'd develop a casino. The casino was never built and the indians' money went to Delay's and other campaigns.
And Delay is responsible for what his supporters did? If Delay was involved then let's see the evidence. Otherwise, he isn't responsible for what his supporters did any more than I am responsible for what my friends do.
3) He led the charge for Redistricting here in Texas, which drew rediculous precinct lines to get more Republicans elected.
Give me a break... ridiculous precinct lines have been all that allowed the Democrats to hold on to a majority in the Texas legislature. Texas is one of the more Republican-leaning states in the Union and until 2002, the majority of Texans in the House of Representatives were Democrats due to the ridiculous gerrymandering of districts. Despite this, the Republicans finally won a majority and decided to implement the same strategy. Take a look at the past 10 Presidential elections... the Republican candidate won Texas by what percentage? How about elections to the Texas Senate (John Cornyn won by how much?). Gubernatorial elections anyone?
Yet you are suggesting here that it is somehow unethical or unfair to redraw Texas districts to reflect the strong support that Republicans enjoy in statewide elections where districts can't be gerrymandered?
Sen. Harry Reid (the Senate Minority Leader) has four sons AND a son-in-law working for Nevada lobbyists. Hughes Corp. paid his son-in-law $300,000 to lobby for a deal that would allow them to purchase prime federal land in metropolitan Las Vegas. Sen. Reid introduced the bill in Congress and got it passed into law. The law firms his sons work at have received more than $2 million from special interests lobbying the Senator.
All of that was in 2003 and not only was it not a major press scandal (receiving notice only in the LA Times before vanishing like a stone dropped in water), the very next year the Democrats elected him as Senate Majority Leader. By contrast, Delay paid $500,000 to relatives using his own campaign funds and it is a major scandal.
I can't say whether or not Delay is an ethical politician because I haven't seen enough information to make that case. What I do know is that Delay has always stood firm for Second Amendment rights and that this current muckraking is motivated by political partisanship more than any dedication to ethics.
