DeLay to Stay Close to Political Action

Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) vowed Tuesday that, although he will quit Congress, he had no plans to leave national politics. Instead, he says, he will fashion a role for himself as a grass-roots leader of social conservatives.

But the former House majority leader’s plans met with mixed reaction from other Republicans, including some social conservatives. Some said DeLay, a formidable fundraiser and born-again Christian who enjoys broad support within the religious right, could quickly become a force to be reckoned with. Others predicted that DeLay would find it hard to shape a new role as long as he remained under the legal and ethical cloud created by his indictment last year by a Texas grand jury on money-laundering charges.

“I look forward to traveling the country and listening to conservatives, helping grass-roots leaders to develop a unifying agenda and a strategy to enact it, to learn from past setbacks and build on our successes,” DeLay said in Texas, where he announced in a videotaped message to supporters that he intended to leave Congress by mid-June.

He sounded upbeat about his future in an earlier interview with Fox News. Far from feeling defeated, he said, “I feel kind of excited, frankly. I’m looking forward to being liberated outside the House, doing whatever I can to unify the conservative cause.”

But Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.) was skeptical of DeLay’s chances of remaking himself.

“In this town, out of sight is out of mind. People fade very quickly once they’re out of power. I think he’ll fade,” LaHood said.

Paul Weyrich, chairman of the Free Congress Foundation, a grass-roots conservative organization, scoffed at the notion that DeLay would become a leader of social conservatives. “As an elected official, when he called conservatives together, he was in a position to do so,” Weyrich said. “On what basis does he operate from the outside?”

Leaders of the movement may be nervous about DeLay’s plans, said a political analyst who asked not to be named because of a close relationship to DeLay, “because there is a new big guy on the block who knows how to do this better than anybody. They might be thinking about their own existence.... I think the way Jack Kemp tapped into the libertarian side of Republicans, he can do the same with evangelicals and fundamental conservatives.”

One of the architects of the GOP’s congressional majority, DeLay earned the nickname “the Hammer” for his hardball tactics as a party leader and legislative tactician. His success as a fundraiser on behalf of GOP candidates and his efforts to place conservative loyalists in lobbying and other important jobs outside government enabled him to build a powerful network of interlocking relationships.

DeLay’s announcement that he was leaving Congress sent shock waves across both Capitol Hill, where he was a feared and respected political leader for more than a decade, and Sugar Land, his hometown, a prosperous planned community about 20 miles southwest of Houston.

Kristen Marz, 36, a DeLay supporter, spoke with a reporter in Sugar Land’s Town Center while loading groceries into her SUV on Tuesday.

She would have voted for DeLay this fall despite his legal troubles, Marz said.

“I think he’s a good guy,” she said. “I don’t think he did anything wrong, but it seems like he did, so he’s suffering the consequences. I think he decided to stop now rather than drag his name and his family through another election. Wouldn’t you? ... I guess it all caught up with him.”

Hairdresser Margaret Blowers, 42, rejoiced in the news that DeLay was quitting.

“I read it in the paper and thought, ‘Oh my God, it’s going to be a good day,’ ” she said. Blowers has never supported DeLay, but most of her clients do, she said. “They still love him,” she said.

The atmosphere in Sugar Land has changed since DeLay’s troubles began mounting, Blowers said. “Before you didn’t say anything out loud against DeLay, he was so powerful. You just didn’t. Now people say what they really think. You can tell the difference.”

There are even bumper stickers around town that never would have appeared in the past: “Don’t DeLay,” they read.

Millie Navarre, 74, was also relieved DeLay was stepping aside. “I was surprised because he has a lot of backers and a lot of money, and money talks,” she said. “I’m very happy he’ll be gone. We’ll be fine with someone new.”

DeLay returned to Capitol Hill and found staffers lined up to applaud and cheer him. His successor, Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), praised DeLay as “a great leader.”

“While not everyone agreed with him every day, he was able to accomplish an awful lot ... and to see him being wrenched through this political stretching machine -- if you will, rack -- is just not fair,” Boehner said.

But pressed by reporters on whether he thought DeLay must bear some responsibility for the actions of his senior staff members, two of whom have pleaded guilty in the scandal stemming from lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s conspiracy to influence legislation by buying gifts, meals and trips for members of Congress and their staffers, Boehner replied: “Yeah.”

Boehner later appeared briefly before reporters with other House Republican leaders to praise DeLay. The leaders then quickly walked away from their microphones, refusing to take questions despite protests from the media.

But sighs of relief were more common from Republicans on Tuesday than were expressions of regret.

Rep. Charles Bass (R-N.H.), who asked DeLay to resign as majority leader last fall after DeLay was indicted in Texas, said the day was almost anticlimactic for him. Ever since DeLay decided late last year not to try to regain his position as majority leader, Bass said, “Tom DeLay was not a player in the affairs of Congress.”

Bass said Democrats had stopped focusing on DeLay in their attacks on what they call the “culture of corruption” they accuse Republicans of having created in Congress, “because they knew you can’t try a dead man -- politically dead, at least. Obviously, it is really over now, and you can’t drag him around the castle any more times than he has already been.”

As a result, Bass said, “the party and the Congress will definitely be better off.”

It is too early to say what DeLay’s political legacy will be, Bass said. That will be determined only after he resolves his legal problems.

“If it was all over today,” he said, “his legacy would be one of a man of tremendous principle, a very strong leader -- but one whose level of controversy was such that the environment just couldn’t tolerate him, and he couldn’t tolerate it.”

All day on Capitol Hill, corridors were abuzz with speculation about what really drove DeLay -- a man who prided himself on never shying away from a political fight -- to drop out of a race he said he thought he still had a good chance of winning. DeLay said it was to spare the party a campaign that had already become “very nasty.”

Mike Franc, a congressional expert at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said that whatever his motivation, DeLay’s decision freed the party to spend millions it would have poured into his race on other races where Republicans were vulnerable.

“In some ways, this is more significant than stepping down from the leadership,” Franc said. “In a political sense, this is waving goodbye to his career, where he has staked his claim for the last 22 years. It is hard to imagine where he goes politically from here.”

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Times staff writer Lianne Hart in Sugar Land contributed to this report.