The Daily Background
| BREAKING: DELAY NOT SEEKING RE-ELECTION
by Arlen Parsa
In a move that may mean Tom DeLay is on shakey legal ground, he has officially announced spread rumors that he is withdrawing from his race for re-election this year. Check this thread for more details as they arise. There will be an official announcement early Tuesday.
Report: Delay to Resign From Congress
Texas Republican and former House majority leader announces his retirement rather than face a re-election fight that appears increasingly unwinnable.
That’s from Washington Post’s breaking news block at the top of their homepage. No full articles are written up yet, but expect the first ones in the next few minutes. I’ll update with links as soon as possible. Stick around for updates.
If this is any indication of how strong a case there is against DeLay, this could be absolutely huge for election chances come November of this year– not so much in DeLay’s own district, but in terms of Republican corruption coming to light all over the country. As a former House Majority Leader, DeLay would be the highest-up congressman to be convicted on corruption charges, ever (as far as I know, somebody correct me if I’m wrong). Update on this angle: Kos writes:
In short, it’s contradictory. If DeLay was a state- or county-level candidate, he definitely could not be replaced. But the law for federal candidates is so confusing that it probably requires a Texas election lawyer to properly unravel.
This being the blogosphere, it shouldn’t take long for that kind of analysis to emerge.
Rumors are that since DeLay won the Republican Party primaries, the Republicans cannot offer a replacement on the ballot. Does this mean an open seat? Perhaps independent canidates entering the race? I would take this with an extremely large amount of salt however, as DeLay seems to think (according to the CNN article below) that somebody else can run in his place. We’ll see.
Update: CNN now a short impromptu article, as does Washington Post.
Update: TIME magazine has the most detailed article published thus far. It’s looking like he’ll be leaving Congress before his term is up in November (undoutedly for legal reasons related to his trial).
Update DeLay is claiming poor poll ratings as the reason why he’s not running again. He says he has a 50-50 chance of winning, which is a bullshit excuse not to run. Just because he’s not sure he’s confident that he’ll win, he doesn’t want to try. Don’t believe the spin, this is for legal reasons, related to his upcoming trial. Further, from the TIME article:
DeLay said he is likely to leave by the end of May, depending on the Congressional schedule and finishing his work on a couple of issues. He said he will change his legal residence to his condominium in Alexandria, Va., from his modest two-story home on a golf course here in the 22nd District of Texas. “I become ineligible to run for election if I’m not a resident of the state of Texas,” he said, turning election law to his purposes for perhaps on last time. State Republican officials will then be able to name another Republican candidate to face Democrat Nick Lampson, a former House members who lost his seat in a redistricting engineered by DeLay.
Final Update for the night I’ll be covering this in detail tomorrow. All the print news outlets are scrambling for more details, and nobody but TIME has a story worth reading yet. NYT is working on it though, as is MSNBC, Associated Press, Reuters, Washington Post, and CNN. Expect real stories on this by tomorrow. For tonight though, TIME is your best bet. There will be a press conference tomorrow morning, and more details will emerge shortly following.
No, sorry no actual press conference. A videotaped speech will be handed to news outlets tomorrow morning, DeLay’s people are producing it and duplicating it right now. This is pretty cheap. Why isn’t he doing a real conference, and sending out a pre-edited videotape? We’ll see. Expect to see the tape all over the news tomorrow though. TIME also has posted the Q&A session from which their article which I already linked to was based on. You can read all six pages of that here.
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