The Criminalization of Politics

I don't normally read Town Hall (it's just gotten too big), but I do get the daily e-mail summary of the day's columns, which I usually look at. I thought this was worth mentioning - former Majority Leader Tom DeLay speaks out in an excerpt from his book, No Retreat, No Surrender: One American's Fight.

I served in the United States Congress for twenty-two years. I was passionate, aggressive, and partisan. I believed in my cause, and I hit hard. It came as no surprise to me then when my political opponents hit back. To open my morning paper and see lies written about me, or see myself painted in the ugliest terms, became a regular part of my life. It was harder to read vicious distortions about my family and friends, but even this I accepted as the price we all paid for the life of leadership I had chosen to pursue.

What I did not expect was a concerted effort to destroy me legally, financially, and personally. I have now spent millions of dollars in lawyers’ fees to answer the lies of the left. I have taken hours away from doing the nation’s business to work through the laborious process of responding to legal charges that my liberal opponents knew were untrue and frivolous when they first filed them. I have watched my family suffer under the burden of not just my political misfortunes—an expected reality in a politician’s family—but of the threat of material destruction, imprisonment, and ruin. This should not be what happens to someone who has defended his political ideals, aggressively, yes, but honorably. A congressman serves his nation by serving his values with passion, and the nation only suffers when partisanship is punished with personal destruction.

I use this word “punished” because it is the best description of what is really happening. I did not serve in Congress for twenty-two years because I simply stumbled into the role or captured it in some illegal way. I was elected by people who thought I was the best representative of their values. Once elected I fought hard for conservative principles and, in time, my fellow conservatives and I won major victories. Remember, these were victories for the very principles we were sent to Congress to serve.

But the liberals could not win on the floor or at the ballot box, so they tried to win by hurting us personally. Like good communists, when they cannot defeat their enemies politically they seek to destroy them personally, and this is what they did to us. All of this is punishment for holding values different from theirs. All of this is the price they want to visit on us simply for being conservative.

It looks like a good read. I think people forget that politicians are real people. It is a shame what we do to their lives.

You can read the entire excerpt here.