It's beggining to look a lot like Christmas

Frist and DeLay all in one day.
As Jazz reported Tom DeLay has been indicted and forced to step down as House Majority Leader. I agree with Marshall Whitman

Tom DeLay will not return as Majority Leader of the House of Representatives. Whatever the outcome of his upcoming trial, he is finished as a Republican Leader. He sealed his doom when he suggested that there was no more fat to be cut out of the federal government. His right wing base both outside and inside the House will now be far less likely to stick with him.

DeLay has become for the Republicans what Jim Wright somewhat unfairly became for the Democrats in the early '90s - a symbol of an entrenched, corrupt establishment.

As the midterm elections rapidly approach "The Hammer" has become a liability even to the wingnuts. It's the hubris stupid.

And strike two for the Republican leadership when The SEC authorized a formal order of investigation of Frist's sale in June of HCA Inc. shares.

Sept. 28 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist faces a near-term ordeal unwelcome to anyone, particularly an ambitious politician: an official probe into his personal financial dealings by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The SEC authorized a formal order of investigation of Frist's sale in June of HCA Inc. shares, people with direct knowledge of the inquiry said yesterday. The order allows the agency's enforcement unit to subpoena documents and compel witnesses to testify, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the order hasn't been made public.

``This turns the flame up under the kettle and keeps the water boiling,'' said Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the independent Rothenberg Political Report in Washington. ``It means he's going to continue to be peppered with questions about this stock sale, and no politician wants to be questioned about things like that.''

A formal order requires the approval of at least one of the SEC's five commissioners. While it raises the legal stakes for Frist, a Tennessee Republican, it doesn't indicate that the SEC's investigators have uncovered evidence of illegal insider trading, said Michael Missal, a former enforcement lawyer at the agency.

``Given the notoriety of this matter, presumably the SEC staff wants to make absolutely sure it can get information quickly from sources other than Senator Frist, who has already said he's cooperating,'' said Missal, now a partner at Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham in Washington.

Steve Soto has more on the Frist story.

If it's not really looking a lot like Christmas it is looking a lot like 1994 only instead of the blue guys it's the red guys. Deja vu all over again as Yogi Berra used to say.

Update
Conservative Republican Tacitus says the Republicans/conservatives got what they deserved.

Now that the indictment of the erstwhile House Majority Leader is an accomplished fact, the wisdom of chaining the conservative movement to Tom DeLay is apparent even to the most fervent of the true believers. The fall of Tom DeLay is not merely a parable of hubris in one man: it is the tale of ego begetting ill-judgment in the conservative movement at large.


The pity is that Republicans who care more about their party than about the cult of personality attendant to its key figures have long warned of this day. We knew all along that Tom DeLay was a bully -- ask the Heritage Foundation about his penchant for petty grudges. We knew all along that he was, on a fundamental level, unprincipled -- ask him about the fat in the Federal budget. We knew all along that he was mostly interested in power for its own sake -- recall, please, that he sought a House rules change to protect his leadership position in this very circumstance. And we knew that if it came to an indictment, it would be the end.


Our task, then, was to make it the end for him, and not the Republican House majority or the conservative movement in power. In this, we failed. It is not a failure we were forced into: it is one we embraced, and hence one we deserve.