Tom Delay

With a record in Washington as long and troublesome as Roy Blunt's, it's a challenge for anyone to keep track of all the stories and scandals. Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, the K Street Project, special favors for Philip Morris....Blunt and his consultants hope you forget them all.

Remembering that bit of wisdom from George Santayana, we've begun to pull together key reports, articles and columns written about Blunt, Inc. into one place.  Check it out. 

Roy Blunt's recent "Jobs for Missouri's Future" Bus Tour is a bore compared to his far more lavish Washington tours. In the "K Street Jobs Tour," Roy and his lobbying buddies make regular stops at their favorite venues along the Potomac, including top restaurants, spas, sporting events, and resorts.

Intrepid Fired Up! tipsters have obtained exclusive access to the tour itinerary and have concocted a virtual tour for your viewing pleasure disgust. Before you get started on this virtual tour, let's stop for a historic review to enhance your understanding of congressional/corporate homology. Discover how Roy Blunt became a leading K Street acolyte and a star pupil of Tom DeLay's, learning the art of deal-making, back-slapping, and go-along-to-get-along politics that have served him so well for the last 14 years.

View Roy Blunt's "K Street Jobs Tour" in a larger map Read More »

Four years ago today, Republicans in the House of Representatives chose a new Majority Leader to replace indicted Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX).  Rep. Roy Blunt, DeLay's hand-picked lieutenant, was expected to fill the slot, and Blunt had publicly predicted an outright win in the three man race. 

Blunt won a plurality of the votes in the first ballot against Reps. John Boehner (R-OH) and John Shadegg (R-AZ) -- but came 6 votes shy of receiving a majority.  Shadegg came in third, and dropped out for the second ballot.  His support swung to Boehner, and Blunt was defeated on the second go-round by a 122-109 vote. 

The rejection of Blunt's bid to be Majority Leader was a clear repudiation of the Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff legacy, to which Blunt was and is inextricably linked. 

The St. Louis Democratic Party launched a new website today at www.BluntAndAbramoff.com looking at the connections between Rep. Roy Blunt and uberlobbyist Jack Abramoff. 

In its initial form, the site focuses on the meetings Blunt and his aides had with Team Abramoff, Blunt's exclusive "friend of the owner" status at Abramoff's DC restaurant, the campaign money Blunt received from Abramoff and Blunt's many connections to Tom DeLay.

Roy Blunt shouldn't really be considered a consummate Washington insider because he inaccurately predicted he'd be elected to replace Tom DeLay as Majority Leader in February 2006.  That's the argument made by columnist Bill McClellan in today's Post-Dispatch. He writes:  

When DeLay announced he would not seek to regain the position, Blunt announced he would run for the job. He issued a press release saying he had the support of the majority of the caucus, but when the secret ballots were counted, Blunt had lost.

That does not sound like an insider to me.

This doesn't make any sense, and completely ignores the actual reasons why Blunt lost the confidence of the GOP Caucus in 2006, and why they chose John Boehner of Ohio instead.  It also ignores that Blunt campaigned for the job by emphasizing his many years in the GOP leadership and "links to the [existing] leadership's system of power and favors." 

George Kennedy, in his January 1 column for the Missourian:

The state’s leading pork producer, Kit Bond, announced his retirement from the U.S. Senate. Rep. Roy Blunt, Missouri’s version of Tom Delay, wants to succeed him. That ambition is not universally applauded even in his own party. If he makes it through the primary, Robin Carnahan will await in November.

I'll double-check, but I'm pretty sure that neither the official Blunt campaign or taxpayer-funded self-promotion materials refer to the Congressman as "Missouri’s version of Tom Delay."

Kennedy is a former managing editor at the Missourian and professor emeritus at the Missouri School of Journalism.

On the long list of things Roy Blunt would rather not talk about in 2010, his leadership in passing George Bush's Medicare Part D legislation is probably near the top of the list.  The tactics employed to just get the bill out of the House are disgusting enough, and then there's the fact that Blunt and his fellow GOP leaders didn't even bother trying to pay for the huge expansion in federal spending. 

Unexpectedly, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) spoke this weekend about the fiscal leadership (or lack thereof) from Bush, Tom Delay, Blunt and the rest of the gang.

Six years ago yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a controversial and still-unfunded Medicare prescription-drug bill with an historic and extremely controversial early morning vote. At least three of Missouri's Representatives -- Roy Blunt, Jo Ann Emerson and Todd Akin -- played key roles in the drama.

Bruce Bartlett, a former policy advisor to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, recalled the vote last week in a column about Republicans' deficit hypocrisy:

[W]hen the legislation came up for its final vote on Nov. 22, 2003, it was failing by 216 to 218 when the standard 15-minute time allowed for voting came to an end.

What followed was one of the most extraordinary events in congressional history. The vote was kept open for almost three hours while the House Republican leadership brought massive pressure to bear on the handful of principled Republicans who had the nerve to put country ahead of party. The leadership even froze the C-SPAN cameras so that no one outside the House chamber could see what was going on.

The Hill's Bob Cusack wrote an amazing article about the 'night the clocks and scoreboard stood still" two years after the vote. He recounts:

Lawmakers say it was the most intense environment on the [House] floor in decades...

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) will withdraw from Dancing with the Stars tonight due to stress fractures in both of his feet.

Four years ago today, the Associated Press published a comprehensive breakdown of the collaboration between Roy Blunt and Tom DeLay to move campaign cash between "secretive" committees. 

Tom DeLay deliberately raised more money than he needed to throw parties at the 2000 presidential convention, then diverted some of the excess to longtime ally Roy Blunt — now occupying DeLay's former post as House Majority Leader — through a series of donations that benefited both men’s causes.

When the financial carousel stopped, DeLay’s private charity, the consulting firm that employed DeLay’s wife and the Missouri campaign of Blunt’s son all ended up with money, according to campaign documents reviewed by The Associated Press.

Jack Abramoff, a Washington lobbyist recently charged in an ongoing federal corruption and fraud investigation, and Jim Ellis, the DeLay fundraiser indicted with his boss last week in Texas, also came into the picture.

Insert joke about Tom DeLay needing [A Number] Two to Tango here:

Four years ago today, House Speaker Dennis Hastert named Roy Blunt to take over Tom DeLay's duties as Majority Leader after DeLay was indicted by a Texas grand jury on a charge of conspiring to violate political fundraising laws.

Blunt was one of DeLay's "staunchest defenders," and even promised to seek guidance from DeLay while he was under indictment. From a 2005 AP story about Blunt's ascendance and closeness to DeLay:

[Blunt] has been among DeLay's most visible defenders since the beginning of a probe into possible campaign fundraising violations. Blunt has contributed $5,000 to DeLay's legal defense fund and $10,000 to the DeLay Foundation, a children's charity.

He continued that support Wednesday after DeLay was indicted by a Texas grand jury on a charge of conspiring to violate political fundraising laws. Blunt vowed that DeLay would not stop exerting influence in the House leadership.

Before Tom Delay made stomachs churn with with his mad dance skillz, he spoke with Politics Daily's Emily Miller about the Republican leadership in Washington:

"Republicans are leaderless,'' [Delay] went on, "so we're just fighting each other instead of Obama's radical policies. There's no political leader of the party taking control. So, Republicans are just attacking each other for being too far right or too far left. Even Rush and Hannity are doing it."

So who does DeLay see as the GOP's up-and-comers? "No one," he replied in exasperation. "It's all the same old guys who were in leadership with me, and those old guys aren't the leaders the party needs."

He couldn't name one viable leader for the Republicans, saying that the party has no chance, "barring a miracle," of regaining the House or Senate next year.

Three years ago yesterday, Roy Blunt was named to the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics In Washington's (CREW) list of "The 20 Most Corrupt Members of Congress."  CREW's list, which contained members of both parties, was released to highlight "the egregious, unethical and possibly illegal activities of the most tainted members of Congress."

CREW's 2006 report touched on several points, including Blunt's secret insertion of a provision into Homeland Security legislation that would have benefited Philip Morris at the expense of competitors, his work for a last-minute provision into a $79 billion emergency Iraq spending appropriations bill benefiting UPS and FedEx, and his ties to Jack Abramoff.