Years later, after driving the House Majority Leader out of office, and serving as key ammunition for democrats to use to overthrow the GOP majority in Congress with corruption charges, the last undismissed count of the contrived and partisan indictment of Tom Delay by radical Austin, Texas prosecutor Ronnie Earle has been demolished by an Appeals Court ruling noting that the alleged illicit financial cooperation between two political entities involved checks, and the Texas statute applied only to cash.

The Austin American Statesman story does its best to give all possible credit to the theory that the contribution of money by one Republican political organization to another really was a form of money-laundering in a deliberate attempt to evade the law. The story fundamentally incorporates also the dubious premise that opportunistic interpretations of the the arcane technicalities of state campaign finance regulations really make the victims of their unique and partisan application genuinely culpable. And it fails to note the rather important point, that though Mr. Delay was nominally and formally involved with the Texas organizations, he was actually in Washington, DC, serving in the very active role of House Majority Leader, and obviously far too busy with Congressional leadership to be personally in charge of the financial operation and details of those local organizations.

It also fails to mention that a previous grand jury declined to find in favor of Earle’s proposed indictment, and that, in an unusual and highly controversial prosecutorial move, Earle empaneled another grand jury and tried again.

We win,” said Dick DeGuerin, DeLay’s lawyer. .. it means every crime Ronnie Earle indicted Tom DeLay for was not a crime.”

Where does Tom Delay go to get his reputation back?

Where does America go to get two years of a democrat majority in Congress back?

Previous postings.

A Texas judge threw out the most important of Activist Prosecutor Ronnie Earle’s indictments against the Texas Association of Business, targeted (along with Tom Delay and his Texans for a Republican Majority) for the alleged crime of interfering with the election of democrats.

A state district judge dealt a crippling blow Thursday to the nearly four-year prosecution of the Texas Association of Business, throwing out a felony indictment against the state’s largest business organization.

District Judge Mike Lynch ruled that 2002 pre-election ads produced by the group did not expressly advocate the election or defeat of Texas legislative candidates. Travis County prosecutors had said the group broke state election law by using corporate money to support candidates.

Lynch’s ruling put in doubt two other similar indictments pending against the organization by also discounting prosecutors’ alternative theory that the ads became illegal when the association coordinated them with other political groups. Lynch called the prosecutors’ argument “innovative” but concluded that state law does not cover it…

Lynch concluded that the ads did not expressly advocate the election or defeat of candidates under the Texas Election Code, which he called “an archaic, cumbersome, confusing, poorly written document in need of serious legislative overhaul.”

The judge wrote that the prosecution’s legal theory on coordination between political groups is a “convoluted maze” that would not give a defendant adequate warning about what they are charged with.

Lynch noted that Earle eloquently argued that the association unfairly attempted to subvert the electoral process. But citing the deficiencies of the indictment and state law, he concluded:

“You simply cannot make a silk purse out of this sow’s ear.”

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court upheld the right of the Republican legislature to redraw (all but one of) Texas’s Congressional voting district lines in the GOP’s favor.

It’s very simple. Just look at this chart from Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle’s admiring profile of Nancy Pelosi. Tom Delay was the House of Representative’s champion fund-raiser in the 2004 House elections, managing to donate $981,278 to Republican colleagues.

Delay’s K Street Project reversed 40 years of the Washington lobbying establishment overwhelmingly financially favoring Democrat candidates. The turn-around effectuated by Delay moved K Street from contributing 70 percent of its campaign funds to Democrats and 30 percent to Republicans to 60 percent Republican, 40 percent Democrat.

It was all about the money. Delay out fund-raised them, and worse, Delay moved lobbyist campaign contributions in the direction of the GOP. Elimination of Delay is a centerpiece of Democrat strategy for a return to power and long-term Congressional dominance.

Faced with declining poll numbers in his re-election race for the House, Tom Delay chose to step aside in order to keep his seat in Republican hands.

In 2004, we defeated democrat Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle fair and square, campaigning against him on issues and positions. In return, democrats have successfully driven the Republican House Majority Leader out of office, by calculatedly dragging out a partisan prosecution based on trumped up charges. Tom Delay’s career was not brought to an end by wrong-doing. It was brought to an end by ruthless partisanship, the manipulation of the legal system, and by successful use of the MSM propaganda machine.

Today, the left-side of the Blogosphere is celebrating, and the right-side of the blogosphere is blandly reporting Delay’s resignation as a news story, or worse, welcoming it.

Glenn Reynolds shrugs, cites Delay’s unfortunate “no fat left in the budget” line, and says “I was never much of a fan.” Wake up, people, we have suffered a serious defeat.

The left has demonstrated again, as it did with Newt Gingrich, that when a conservative Republican becomes too powerful, too influential, too effective, they can take him out.

First, the media machine goes to work on demonizing him as a personality. An endless series of photos with surly, snarly, or goofy expressions will be published, accompanied by lovingly detailed reporting of every indiscreet expression, gaffe, or unwise remark. After many months, the public naturally develops the sense that there’s this really mean, and strange in a sinister kind of way, guy, who’s somehow suddenly become terribly important in Washington, and who is a threat to everything that’s good.

Then, come the scandals. “We already knew he was nasty and strange, who would have imagined he was also a crook?”

A political career today is like a running a restaurant in the Big City. if they want to close you down, they send in the health and the building inspectors, and there are so many regulations, the building code is so large and so detailed, that is impossible to be in complete compliance, if they need to, they can always find a violation. In Delay’s case, they sent in Ronnie Earle (a leftwing activist who has used the Bolshevik base of a big university to get elected county prosecutor) to cook up a few alleged violations of arcane campaign finance regulations, which charges he had to run repeatedly past rubber-stamp grand juries before he could get one to vote an indictment.

But today, months have dragged by, that bogus Texas prosecution has remained unresolved, a new lobbying scandal has erupted, and the liberal meda has been hammering on him for what seems like forever. NowTom Delay finds himself in the position of some famous outlaw trying to win the votes of a constituency which is wondering why he isn’t already in jail. It’s common knowledge, at this point, that this Delay fellow is some kind of a crook, a nasty customer, and the kind of guy who bullies people and breaks all the rules. Who’s going to vote for Black Bart for Congress?

Delay’s a keen politician. Seeing he was losing, Tom Delay decided he would take a bullet for the Grand Old Party, and resign. The left rejoices, but you cannot find a sympathetic word for poor old Tom Delay on the right this morning. I know a fellow who has been in the Conservative Movement since its early days, who has often remarked that “the Conservative Movement has never learned to care for its wounded, or bury its dead.” Days like today suggest he may be right.

I didn’t like that Congressional budget either, but I know that Tom Delay is one of us: a Republican and a conservative. He has fought with us on the same side for decades, and we owe him something. On mere practical political grounds, we should also not be quite so cooperative, when the left undertakes one of these carefully contrived political assassinations. How many strong and competent Congressional leaders do you think we are ever going to find? If we let our adversaries destroy the reputations of each one of them in turn, and drive all of them from office, the left is certainly going to win.

The NY Times reports:

In letters sent Saturday to fellow House Republicans and to Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, Mr. DeLay said he supported the call for an election for a new leader and was stepping aside to avoid becoming a political liability as Republicans battle to hold their majority.

“The job of majority leader and the mandate of the Republican majority are too important to be hamstrung, even for a few months, by personal distractions,” said Mr. DeLay.

Mr. DeLay intends to seek re-election to his seat representing the Houston suburbs and reclaim his position on the Appropriations Committee.

Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio said of Delay:

I can say without hesitation he is one of the most effective and gifted leaders the Republican Party has ever known.”

The headlines read:

Washington Post: DeLay’s Felony Charge Is Upheld

San Francisco Chronicle: DeLay can’t avoid trial over charges

Houston Chronicle: Ruling diminishes likelihood DeLay regains leader’s post

when what they should be saying is:

BBC: DeLay conspiracy charge dropped

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And I’m not the only one who noticed. Daniel J. Solove made precisely the same point today. Hat tip to Jonah Goldberg.

Anti-Republican elements in the Justice Department (could those be the same ones who picked Fitzgerald as special prosecutor?) have leaked a 2003 memo “endorsed” by six lawyers and two analysts in the department’s voting section, which opines that the Texas legislature’s redistricting plan, since upheld twice by a three judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, may violate the Voting Rights Act, to the Washington Post.

Post staff writer Dan Egger artfully mixes generous helpings of inflammatory charges by democrat partisans, conceptually promoting an internal staff memo advancing one point of view to the level of statutory law, with the minimum essential inconvenient facts, and reference to the (partisan) indictment of Representative Delay, topped by the censorious conclusion of a purportedly objective outside expert,

Mark Posner, a longtime Justice Department lawyer who now teaches law (as an adjunct) at American University (who) said it was ‘highly unusual’ for political appointees to overrule a unanimous finding such as the one in the Texas case.”

And voila! we have a brand-new Bush Administration Conspiracy to Violate the Law.

Armando over at Daily Kos is gloating, and has overnight collected some 122 moonbat comments remarking gleefully on the Bush Administration’s “arrogance and contempt for democracy.”

I’ve heard a lot about Tom Delay, but I hadn’t heard there was another campaign finance case underway. JayTea at Wizbang points to a story by Bullwinkle at Random Numbers highlighting MSM’s hypocritical double-standards in the case of Hillary Clinton‘s potential campaign finance scandal.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review columnist Salena Zito wittily quotes the title of a Dixie Chicks’ abusive men Country Western song in the title of her Sunday column observing that “Ronnie Earle, the district attorney from Travis County in Texas, finally has made his strongest case for removing a political operative from office — himself. “