Washington Ponders a New Life Without DeLay

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Washington Ponders a New Life Without DeLay: Andrew Ferguson
Oct. 4 (Bloomberg) -- The indictment last week of one of Washington's most prominent and powerful Republicans, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, is bad news for the Republican Party.

Now wait: Before I'm drowned out by the collective roar of ``Well, duh,'' I should quickly add that it's not such great news for Democrats, either. Which means that, in the long run, it might not be such bad news for Republicans.

Politics is often confusing in this way -- which is why political pundits are so indispensable to the healthy functioning of this noble experiment we call democracy. First consider the Republicans. For more than a year, as they grow increasingly contented with their monopoly control of the executive and legislative branches, a vague odor of corruption has gathered around them.

There is, for starters, the still-unfolding story of Jack Abramoff, a veteran conservative activist-turned-lobbyist and a friend of DeLay.

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http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000039&refer=columnist_ferguson&sid=aDAxgWdjtRBw

[Dunvegan]

1. Someone has to write it....

http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000039&refer=columnist_ferguson&sid=aDAxgWdjtRBw

``Thanks to Gingrich, 1994 was that rare moment when the opposition party actually had developed alternative ideas about how to govern,'' says Marshall Wittmann, who served as political director of the Christian Coalition before defecting to the Democratic Leadership Council, where he's a senior fellow.

A glance through Gingrich's famous ``Contract With America'' is instructive. Half the document dealt with reforming a corrupt Congress by cutting congressional perks and staff, for example, and limiting the terms of committee chairmen.

But the remainder of the contract advanced concrete proposals for fighting street crime, indexing capital gains taxes, reforming product liability laws and much else.

Alert voters were thus justified in seeing Republicans not just as non-corrupt non-Democrats, but also as potential leaders with thought-through ideas about how to govern. "

So...if no one in Congress on the Democratic side of the asile has a counter offer to voters, something better than the Republicans offered with the "Contract With America"...something better to hope for and agree to work for together...perhaps we should build a contract ourselves from the grass-roots and present it to our Congress Critters.

We just can't keep drowning here...if we don't stand up and help our politicians help the American people...we may just all go down like NOLA.