The Hill
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There’s no doubt that House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) would rather not be the target of zealous prosecutor.
But if he must be such a target, DeLay is probably lucky that the prosecutor in question is Travis County, Texas, District Attorney Ronnie Earle.
In the case so far — the latest news came Monday, when Earle got a grand jury, on its first day, before it had a chance to get a cup of coffee, to indict DeLay on money-laundering charges — Earle has shown a strange enthusiasm in pursuing his case.
More than anything else, Earle seems motivated by a desire to educate the country about his belief that corporate campaign contributions constitute an evil influence in American politics. Just look at what DeLay defenders call the “dollars for dismissals” scheme.
As part of the DeLay investigation, in September 2004 Earle indicted eight corporations on charges of making illegal political contributions.
But then he approached several of them with a deal. According to a source close to one of those companies, Sears, Earle offered to drop the charges if Sears agreed to give hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University for the purpose of producing a program designed to educate the public on the evils of corporate contributions.
“They asked for an outrageous amount of money,” one Sears source said last summer — especially since the maximum penalty Sears would have faced had it lost the case would have been $20,000.
But Earle wanted to get his message to the American public. “My concern has been that there needed to be a conversation about the role of corporations in American democracy,” he said a few months ago. “How do you do that? I think it is vitally important to the future of the country that there be a discussion of this concept.”
Sears refused to give money to Stanford, suggesting an alternative program — the same sort of thing — at the University of Texas in Austin. Earle agreed, and Sears turned over $100,000.
The agreement between Sears and Earle says, “The defendant, after discussions with the district attorney, has decided to financially support a nonpartisan, balanced and publicly informative program or series of programs relating to the role of corporations in American democracy.” Sears also acknowledged that corporate contributions “constitute a genuine threat to democracy.”
Three other companies — Cracker Barrel, Questerra and Diversified Collection Services — made similar deals with Earle.
That was then. Now, there’s even more evidence that Earle is using the DeLay investigation as part of an educational crusade.
For the past two years, Earle has allowed two Texas filmmakers to follow him around as he conducted the investigation that led to the recent indictments. The resulting film, “The Big Buy,” features long interviews with Earle — DeLay did not cooperate — and, once more, Earle focuses on his pet cause.
“The root of the evil of the corporate and large-monied-interest domination of politics is money,” Earle says in the film.
“This is in the Bible. This isn’t rocket science. The root of all evil truly is money, especially in politics. People talk about how money is the mother’s milk of politics. Well, it’s the devil’s brew. And what we’ve got to do, we’ve got to turn off the tap.”
And just to make it completely clear that Earle considers corporate money in politics a very, very, bad thing, at another point in the movie he calls it “every bit as insidious as terrorism.”
Now, perhaps you, too, believe that Sears’s (probably legal) $25,000 contribution to a DeLay-related political action committee was as bad as Sept. 11. Or perhaps you don’t.
But in Earle’s mind, apparently, it’s all connected.
“What’s funny is, the regular run-of-the-mill work of a prosecutor’s office,” he says in the film, “which sounds like a horror story — murder, rape, robbery, burglary, theft, child abuse, these horrible things people do to each other — it’s hard to see the connection between the abuse of the democratic process and dealing crack, for example, or robbing a 7-Eleven, but there is a connection.”
It would be nice if Earle would explain what that is, but he doesn’t. And his words become even more inexplicable when one considers that Texas is one of just 18 states that bar corporate contributions to campaigns (although corporations can contribute to the administration expenses of political action committees). That means 32 states do not have such a ban.
So is that a crime as serious as murder? Rape? Robbery?
Don’t say that to Earle. His performance in “The Big Buy” sends an ominous warning to anyone who might disagree with his particular vision.
“It’s important that we forgive those who come to us in a spirit of contrition and the desire for forgiveness,” Earle says. “But if they don’t, then God help them.”
York is a White House correspondent forNational Review. His column appears in The Hill each week. E-mail: byork@thehill.com
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