Lou Dubose

Willie Searcy’s trip to the Texas Supreme Court began in the rain on a Dallas freeway. He was 14 years old in April 1993 when a Mercury Cougar driven by a 17-year-old hydroplaned across the median and slammed into the Ford pickup driven by Willie’s stepfather, Ken Miles. Miles’ life was saved by the steering wheel, which absorbed some of the impact of the head-on collision. Willie’s 12-year-old brother, Jermaine, was saved by a snug seatbelt that held him securely in the middle seat. Willie was not so fortunate. Just before the crash, he leaned forward to pick a piece of paper off the floor. The tension eliminator, which allows the seatbelt to spool out when a passenger leans forward, then retracts the slack and holds the belt in place when the passenger is sitting upright, apparently failed.

Willie Searcy had no broken bones. But the posterior ligaments that held his head in alignment with his spinal cord were torn and stretched. He would spend the rest of his life as a “ventilator-dependent quadriplegic.” After being airlifted off the freeway, he spent three months in Methodist Hospital in Dallas and three more months in a private rehab facility. Within six months, Willie’s mother Susan Miles and her husband Ken were looking at $550,000 in medical bills. The rest of their lives, in fact, would be defined by medical bills. Their teenage son would require full-time nursing care. He would have to be “coughed” by an attendant. His trachea tube would have to be regularly suctioned to allow a clear path for the ventilator to breathe for him. Every bodily function would be regulated or performed by a machine, relative, nurse, or attendant. It was far beyond what Ken, a parts clerk at a Ford dealership, or Susan, a medical records clerk, could expect from their healthcare coverage.

Willie’s attorney, Jack Ayres, wanted to get the case to trial as fast as possible. He believed that a defective part with a history of failure had caused Willie’s near-fatal impact with the dashboard, and he set out to sue Ford. Until the tort reform law that Gov. George W. Bush pushed through the Legislature in 1995, plaintiffs in Texas could file suit either where the cause of the lawsuit took place or in any county where the defendant did business. Ford would have preferred to defend itself in Dallas, where conservative judges and juries are friendlier to corporate defendants. Ayres filed in state district court in Henderson, a small East Texas town where there was a Ford dealership. The docket was shorter there, which ensured a faster trial date. The jury pool was probably more favorable to his client. And the state law allowed him a choice of forum.

“We were in a race to save this kid’s life,” Ayres said.

Cases like Willie Searcy’s involve a lot of discovery, hundreds of hours of depositions, hundreds of thousands of pieces of documentary evidence, and countless pretrial motions. They are slow by nature and defendants often try to make them slower, hoping to exhaust the resources of the plaintiff’s lawyers, who bear all costs until there is a judgment or settlement. It was not surprising that Ford moved for more time after the judge set the trial for January 1995. What was surprising was what followed after the judge denied Ford’s request.

From out of nowhere or, more precisely, from out of the Texas prison system, Willie’s estranged biological father intervened and asked for time to allow him to prepare for the case. Willie’s attorneys wondered if Ford’s defense team had contacted him in an attempt to slow the proceedings. But lawyers on Ford’s defense team insisted they had nothing to do with the father’s request. Visitor logs at the prison where the father was incarcerated suggested otherwise. Margaret Keliher, a lawyer on Ford’s defense team who was later elected Dallas County judge, had visited the prison. Four years later, while working on a book, I asked her if she had gone to the prison to bring Willie’s father into the case. She told me that a lot of time had passed and the question — whether, as a corporate defense attorney, she had traveled to East Texas to meet with a convicted criminal — was taxing her memory. When Willie’s lawyers warned his father that intervention in the case would delay his son’s trial, he withdrew.

Ford is always a dogged defendant. One of its in-house lawyers explained the company’s litigation strategy to the National Law Journal. Ford would make only one pretrial offer. “I don’t give a shit if they take it or not,” Ford lawyer James A. Brown told the Journal. “If the plaintiff doesn’t settle, it doesn’t matter to us. We tell them ‘we’re coming after you.’”

At the end of the four-month trial, an East Texas jury took only four hours to award Willie Searcy $30 million. On the following day, it met for 90 minutes and awarded the Searcy family an additional $10 million in punitive damages. Jack Ayres had asked for $26 million.

Predictably, Ford came after Willie Searcy and his lawyers. The company appealed both the jury decision and Ayres’ filing of his pre-appeal motions in what they claimed was the wrong appeals court. Willie Searcy lost another year, getting none of his jury award. What was finally ruled to be the appropriate appeals court overturned the $10 million in punitive damages and raised one legal question about the $30 million award, which it allowed to stand.

Ford’s legal team then took the $30 million in actual damages to the Texas Supreme Court. But the attorneys were decent enough to request an expedited hearing of the case. They recognized that Willie Searcy was kept alive by a patched-together system involving state caretakers, friends, and family working with him at home. There was no backup ventilator or generator to cover a temporary power failure. On paper, Willie was a millionaire, with a jury award that would have provided first-class healthcare. At home in a Dallas suburb, he lived in healthcare limbo.

On the Texas Supreme Court, cases are assigned by a blind draw. Justices pick up cards with case names on them and take charge of those cases. One of the cards Priscilla Owen picked up as the court began its 1996 session had “Miles v. Ford” written on it. “That kid’s fate was decided when Justice Owen picked that card,” said a lawyer who worked at the Supreme Court at the time.

Priscilla Owen was a Karl Rove candidate for the Supreme Court. An oil and gas lawyer from Houston, she had never been a judge when Bush’s lifetime political advisor made her the candidate for an open seat in 1994 and helped direct her successful campaign. Republicans were methodically taking state government away from the Democrats, and Rove was the architect of the takeover, recruiting candidates for statewide office and directing their campaigns. Rove had advised the campaigns of every candidate on the Supreme Court (and the governor and both U.S. senators). On the bench, Owen positioned herself to the right of the court’s most conservative justice, Nathan Hecht, whom she occasionally dated. They were kept in check (in the courtroom) by a centrist bloc led by Deborah Hankinson, a 1997 Bush appointee whom the Wall Street Journal described as “the rising star on the Texas Supreme Court.”

Two years after the lawyers representing Willie Searcy and the lawyers representing Ford had requested an expedited hearing, Owen wrote the majority opinion. A process that could have been completed within months of the oral argument in November 1996 dragged on until Owen completed her opinion in March 1998.

Her opinion was stunning. Not because it ruled against Willie Searcy and his mother, Susan Miles, but because of how it ruled against them. Owens ruled the case would have to be retried in Dallas because it was initially filed in the wrong venue. Yet venue was not among the issues, or “points of error,” the court said it would consider two years earlier when it took up the case. “We felt like we got ambushed,” said Ayres. A lawyer who had worked at the court at the time agreed: “If venue wasn’t in the points of error, it is unusual that the court addressed it. If the justices decide they want the court to address something not in the points of error, they would ask for additional briefing. They send letters to the parties and ask for briefing.” There had been no letters and no requests.

Willie Searcy’s case was a textbook example of “results oriented” justice that is common in Texas. Often, judges first determine the desired outcome of a case. Then they adapt the facts and the law to make it happen. It was also a glaring example of judicial activism, or making law from the bench, which is anathema to conservative Republicans — unless it serves their purposes, as it did in the Terri Schiavo case.

These rulings are not entirely informed by the justices’ love for certain principles of law. If the Texas Supreme Court is the most business-friendly bench in the nation — and it is — it’s because corporate interests pay for the justices’ election campaigns. Of the $175,328 Owen took in from the Texas defense bar while Willie Searcy’s case moved through the courts, she got $20,450 from Baker Botts, the mega-firm run by Bush family consigliere James A. Baker III. Baker Botts was part of Ford’s defense team. It was business as usual in Texas, where the defense bar now pours so much money into Supreme Court races that justices would be left sitting in their chambers if they recused themselves from cases in which their big donors are involved.

So Priscilla Owen is the perfect Bush appointee to the appellate bench. If she’s not particularly distinguished as a jurist — and she’s not — she has demonstrated her willingness to creatively interpret the law in service to both the business community and the extreme Christian right.

Owen was creative to the point of deviousness in the Searcy case. Her delay could be explained (at least in part) by the long, detailed opinion she decided to write. Yet the content of that opinion was as stunning as her ruling on a venue issue that hadn’t been briefed before the court. While Willie Searcy waited for the money that would provide him adequate healthcare, Owen and her clerks spent months laboring over a precedent-setting opinion for a statute that no longer existed. It had been replaced by the 1995 tort-reform bill Bush pushed through the Legislature.

Why would a justice write a precedent-setting opinion to clear up contradictions in a law that was no longer on the books? “Priscilla Owen poured [Willie Searcy] out,” the former court clerk said in the argot of civil litigation. Even Owen’s colleagues were remorseful. The day after the court’s decision, the entire court issued a rare addendum to the opinion: “[T]hese appeals should have been concluded months ago, we unanimously agree that the parties’ request [for an expedited decision] should have been granted.” The court had voted 5-4 against Willie Searcy. But it unanimously agreed to apologize for the unconscionable delay.

Ayres began the case again, this time in Dallas. Ruling on a point of law that wasn’t raised in the appeals and writing about a statute that no longer existed, Owen had put him there. Ford’s second round of procedural appeals finally ran out on June 29, 2001, when the Dallas Court of Appeals handed down a ruling that seemed to guarantee Susan Miles the money she needed to care for her son. The boy — who had (heroically) graduated from high school, wheeled from class to class by an attendant who monitored the ventilator that kept him breathing and held a transducer to his throat to allow him to “talk” — was now 21 and living by a system his parents had patched together.

Four days later, on July 3, the patchwork system of care unraveled. Willie’s night attendant left at 4 a.m. At 5 a.m. Susan Miles walked into her son’s bedroom and immediately realized that something was wrong. The ventilator was not working. “Aged out” of Medicaid at 21, Willie’s weekly nursing allotment had been reduced from 104 to 34 hours. His working-class parents didn’t have the resources to hire round-the-clock attendants or place him in a facility where he would have round-the-clock monitoring and care. What Jack Ayres had described nine years earlier as “a race to save this kid’s life” had become a marathon. But it was over.

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing — before Owen’s appointment was blocked by Democrats the first time around — Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., asked Owen why the decision took so long while Willie Searcy’s life was in peril. Owen’s answer was straightforward and, for the record, honest.

“He didn’t pass away while his case was before my court,” she said.

In Texas, we saw this modern iteration of the Republican Party come together in the summer or 1994, as Bush kicked off his first successful run for public office. (He had lost a congressional race in West Texas in 1978, in which Rove was only marginally involved.) Social conservatives had already joined together with economic conservatives when Ronald Reagan got into bed with the Rev. Jerry Falwell. But it was Rove who consecrated the union. A nominal Christian and Episcopalian, Rove had little regard for the evangelical extremists who have become essential to the success of the modern Republican Party, even cracking the occasional joke about his own lack of faith.

Then the Christian right showed up at the Republicans’ state convention in Fort Worth, in 1994, with enough delegates to seize control of the party. The dominant Christian faction tossed George H.W. Bush’s handpicked state chairman and longtime friend, Fred Meyer, out of office and replaced him with a charismatic Catholic lawyer from Dallas. It banned liquor from convention hotels and replaced hospitality-room bars with “ice cream sundae bars,” where chefs prepared designer confections. It summoned delegates to Grand Old Prayer Sessions, required Christian fealty oaths of candidates for party leadership, and made opposition to abortion the brand by which Texas Republicans would be defined.

This political great awakening was not unique to Texas. But it occurred in a context in which a brilliant, Pygmalion political consultant saw in George W. Bush a malleable idol who could be fashioned into a governor and ultimately a president. And Bush was a candidate whose genuine evangelical faith was an asset rather than a liability. After initially fighting the dominant evangelical delegation at the state convention — proposing Texas Rep. Joe Barton as a compromise candidate for state party chairman — Rove joined them.

He found religion, even if he didn’t find Jesus. And it was a foxhole conversion at best. Rove had been brought to Texas by the elder Bush in the early ’80s and devoted his energies to building a Republican Party where there was none — using direct mail, money and databases in ways that Texas Democrats never imagined. There was one statewide Republican elected official when Rove began his work, U.S. Sen. John Tower. Today, Republicans hold all 22 statewide offices. But the party Karl Rove built was based on the economic conservatism of Barry Goldwater, not the social conservatism of Jerry Falwell. Once Bush was elected governor, Rove marginalized the Christian right’s party chairman, Tom Pauken, denying him access to party money, and when Pauken ran for state attorney general, Rove quietly assisted the campaign of his primary opponent, John Cornyn, who now represents Texas in the United States Senate. Yet despite the low regard in which he held evangelicals, Rove recognized the importance of keeping them in harness with economic conservatives.

The “guns, God, and gays” campaigns that defined Texas politics and the politics of the South became the model for Republican Party campaigns across the country. It was Rove who was responsible for the whispering campaign that characterized Democratic Gov. Ann Richards, Bush’s opponent in the 1994 governor’s race, as a closet lesbian, in a successful attempt to peel away conservative Christian votes in East Texas.

Perhaps the most recent example of a successful social-issues campaign was in Ohio during the 2004 election, which provided critical electoral votes to secure George Bush’s second term. With Bush in peril of losing to John Kerry, the Republican National Committee looked to David Barton to go into Ohio and turn out the base. Barton is a former vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party and one of the founders of the WallBuilders, a Christian advocacy group working to restore God to His central position in American history, and in the history and social studies curricula of the nation’s public schools.

Barton comes straight out of the social conservative wing of the Republican Party Rove put together and then left behind in Texas when he followed Bush to Washington in 2001. And Barton represents both the success and what now might be the failure of the Republican Party Rove cobbled together. U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III mentioned Barton by name, in his 2005 opinion that declared “intelligent design” (biblical creationism dressed up as science) unconstitutional to teach in the nation’s public schools. Jones, a George W. Bush appointee to the federal bench, was particularly offended by the Dover, Penn., school board president’s stated intention to move from Christian intelligent design in biology classes to Christian social studies in history classes. The judge cited both Barton and his book, “The Myth of Separation,” as examples of a school board that was in open violation of the Constitution. (WallBuilders do not recognize the separation of church and state as defined by the First Amendment.)

In Pennsylvania, Judge Jones’ angry repudiation of the Christian majority on the school board was both a portent and part of the dissolution of the union over which Rove presided in 1994 in Fort Worth. Jones, a Tom Ridge protégé, was unequivocal in asserting the primacy of the Separation Clause over the religious interests of local governing bodies. Like this moderate judge, the larger public — and even the Republican Party, if the candidacy of Rudy Giuliani means anything — has grown weary of the Christian right. It was a marriage as unlikely as the union between an evangelical George W. Bush and Episcopalian Karl Rove.

It appears that it’s over. As Rove returns to the Hill Country home in Texas he and his wife, Darby, bought and refurbished, the party in which he invested his energy, if not his soul, is divided among social and economic conservatives. Even Texas Sen. John Cornyn, a one-time moderate who drank the Kool-Aid with the Christians in the Texas Republican Party, is in trouble with the state’s voters. Cornyn, like Bush, was a creation of Karl Rove. Maybe Rove can save a Senate seat, if not his soul, by quietly throwing in with Cornyn’s campaign, after he settles back down in the state where it all began.

Old Texas had been run by a cabal the state’s then-agriculture commissioner, Jim Hightower, referred to as the “bankers, bullies and bastards who run this state.” Richards had defeated a corporate cowboy (and banker) from West Texas and succeeded a Dallas oilman who served as Richard Nixon’s undersecretary of defense. (Her 1990 opponent, Clayton Williams, had offended women with a campfire joke made to reporters at his ranch: “Rape is like the weather, you can’t do anything about it so you might as well lay back and enjoy it.”) Richards’ new Texas would broker a division of power among those bankers, bullies and bastards — and the trial lawyers, environmentalists, consumer activists, feminists, and gay and lesbian political operatives who made Richards governor. If Ann Richards failed to manage that delicate balance of power in the one term she served as governor of this state, she gets some credit for trying.

Texas’ populist constitution created a plural executive, dividing executive power among some 20 statewide elected officials. The governor is a first among equals, actually second in power to the lieutenant governor, who presides over the Senate. “A glorified ribbon cutter,” is how a former Democratic speaker described the job. The governor’s power lies in appointments to the agencies, boards and commissions that do the work of government. Richards used that power to create the new Texas for which she had campaigned. Forty-four percent of her appointees to state boards and commissions were women. Twenty percent were Hispanic. Fourteen percent were African-American. Her two predecessors — one Democratic and one Republican — had a combined average of 77 percent Anglo men.

There was much more to Richards than the large personality that has made her an icon and the stuff of political caricature. In bas relief beneath the woman delivering lacerating one-liners, the silver-haired grandmother riding a Harley on her 60th birthday, and the “homemaker” who became governor, was an elected official who genuinely cared about governing. “She never believed that government was the problem,” said Rebecca Lightsey, a Richards appointee to the Texas Insurance Commission. “She believed that the function of government was to solve people’s problems.”

Richards campaigned on the “pothole” and good government issues she had worked in two terms as Travis County commissioner in Austin and two terms as state treasurer: insurance, ethics and environment. She had also dealt with constituent issues as a legislative aide to state Rep. Sarah Weddington, who as a young lawyer had prevailed in the Roe v. Wade abortion rights case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Once elected, Richards set out to deliver on her campaign promises. “On her first day in office, she started working on a insurance crisis that existed at the time,” Lightsey said. “She took on the redlining that shut minorities out of the insurance market and made it illegal. And by the time she left office, Texas had health insurance reform that was adopted by the federal government.”

Richards created the state’s first ethics commission. She merged the Texas air and water regulation boards into one unified environmental agency — then appointed an African-American who was not sanctioned by the business community to direct it. For more than a year, she traveled the state with a “Capitol for a Day” program, leading an entourage of agency heads and staffers from city to city to meet the constituents they served.

“She followed a generation of all those big Texas figures,” says Mary Sanger, a campaign director Richards appointed to the state’s housing commission. “Sam Rayburn, Lyndon Johnson, Ralph Yarborough, John Connally, Ben Barnes. For all their faults, and all their big egos, they honestly believed in government, that government should do something for the people. Ann belonged to the generation after them. She believed in government.”

But Richards was elected to a state and a region in political transition. When she was elected as state treasurer, an office she held for two terms before she ran for governor in 1990, each of the statewide elected offices was held by a Democrat. By the time George W. Bush won his second term as president in 2004, every one of those offices was held by a Republican — most of them clients of Bush’s lifelong political advisor Karl Rove.

It was Rove who brought defeat to Richards in the 1994 gubernatorial election. Though she outspent Bush and started the campaign far ahead of him, Rove turned her new Texas against her, using a standard “God, guns and gays” campaign to bring her down. Richards had vetoed a statute in support of concealed handguns, aware that it would be used against her in the next race, precisely as Rove and Bush did use it.

She promoted environmental protections for Austin and the Texas Hill Country, which also worked against her. She had also presided over the largest expansion of prisons in Texas and a declining rate in violent crime — but Rove and Republican political consultant Don Sipple designed a “soft on crime” campaign against her anyway. Rove also used a highly regarded Republican East Texas state senator to advance a whisper campaign about gays and lesbians surrounding Richards, some of whom had been appointed to boards and commissions that were to represent Richards’ new Texas.

Richards bore responsibility for her loss in that she vastly underestimated George W. Bush — and more important, Karl Rove and his ability to exploit the Texas old guard. “I think in the end she found herself caught between the liberalism of the 1950s and a new emerging progressive politics,” Sanger said. “And the traditional forces that had controlled the state.”

Surrounded by her family, Richards died of cancer in her downtown Austin condo. She was 73, on medical leave from Public Strategies, a consulting and lobbying firm. At the time of her death she was still working on behalf of the less privileged constituents who had followed her up Congress Avenue 15 years earlier. With her daughter Ellen, she was working on the advisory committee of the Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders, an Austin public school that will open in September 2007.

The most recent stories about DeLay include accounts of:

The five plaintiffs claim that DeLay’s Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee raised and spent illegal corporate, or “soft,” money in the 2002 election in Texas. Specifically, they allege that of the $1.5 million TRMPAC spent in a campaign against 23 Democratic candidates for the Texas House, $723,737 was unreported soft money — which, with a few exceptions, cannot be spent in political campaigns in Texas. TRMPAC treasurer Bill Ceverha is the last defendant standing in the prelude to one more civil suit and a criminal case not yet on the docket in the state district court in Austin. (DeLay’s Washington political aide Jim Ellis and his Austin fundraiser John Colyandro have been dropped as defendants until the criminal case in which they have been indicted is resolved.)

Another DeLay housemate from Macho Manor, Bill Hammond, is not a defendant in this lawsuit. But he will be defending himself and the Texas Association of Business in a separate suit involving similar allegations about illegal corporate money spent in the 2002 elections. (His attorney sat in the courtroom taking notes.) And while no one from the Texas Association of Business has been indicted, they are not home free yet. Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle is expected to hand down additional indictments before the criminal trial, which is expected to begin sometime this summer. The D.A. is also looking into the TAB’s use of corporate money to fund mailings and issue ads that targeted Democratic candidates, while not overtly advocating the election or defeat of any specific candidate.

If the first day of this first trial provided any indication of what’s to come, the next six months will seem like an eternity for DeLay, even if he avoids indictment in Texas. Defense attorney Scarborough had it wrong. This is about DeLay. The Sugar Land, Texas, congressman who was known as “Hot Tub Tom” when he lived at Macho Manor, may not be in court in Austin, but the case — in fact the entire season of litigation — is all about him. “Tom DeLay was up to his eyeballs in it,” plaintiffs’ attorney Cris Feldman told National Public Radio reporter Wade Goodwyn a few days before the trial began. “It was Tom DeLay’s people, all the way down to his daughter, helping to run TRMPAC.”

In court Feldman was more specific, revealing for the first time that some of the corporate money, $25,000 to be precise, was handed directly to DeLay. In his opening statement, Feldman referred to a Reliant Resources lobbyist giving the House majority leader $25,000. In the plaintiffs’ exhibits is a letter (I found it in those exhibits six months ago) from Oklahoma-based Williams Companies conveying an additional $25,000 contribution — addressed to “Congressman Tom DeLay.” Williams is one of eight corporations indicted by the Austin D.A. Reliant was not indicted but is accused by Earle of giving an illegal contribution to TRMPAC fundraiser Colyandro.

The first TRMPAC document in the plaintiffs’ PowerPoint presentation included DeLay’s name at the top of a list describing the TRMPAC team. DeLay was placed at fundraising events in San Antonio and Houston. Warren Robold, one of the three individuals indicted by the Austin D.A., was identified as part of “DeLay’s network in Washington, D.C.” A Union Pacific lobbyist “needed a DeLay person to accompany him when he handed out checks.” And Danni Ferro’s role as event coordinator for TRMPAC was described by counsel for both the plaintiffs and the defendant. Ferro is DeLay’s daughter.

Without Tom DeLay, Bill Ceverha and Bill Hammond wouldn’t be defending themselves in two separate lawsuits. And DeLay’s fundraisers in Austin wouldn’t be facing the prospect of prison sentences — one as long as 99 years. “DeLay is wrapped up in the fact pattern of the case,” Feldman said during an afternoon break. “You can’t explain what happened without including him.” It is still possible that the Travis County D.A. and grand jury will include DeLay in a second round of indictments expected to come down later this spring.

This civil suit and the criminal case to come are all tied to DeLay’s calculated and successful attempt to win a GOP majority in the Texas House, where a Republican speaker would follow DeLay’s lead and redraw the state’s congressional lines. (Texas sent six new Republicans to Congress in the last election, expanding the party’s narrow majority there.)

DeLay’s problems have been easier to manage in Washington. After he was admonished three times by the House Ethics Committee, DeLay and Speaker Dennis Hastert replaced the Republican committee chairman, Colorado’s Joel Hefley, and added two new members to the committee, both of whom had made contributions to DeLay’s legal defense fund. While stacking the deck, the House leadership also rewrote the committee’s rules, ending the practice of automatically beginning an investigation 45 days after a complaint is filed. Investigations now require a majority vote, and the Ethics Committee is the only committee in the House that is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans.

It won’t be so easy to game the system in Austin. In 28 years in office, D.A. Earle, a Democrat, has built a career on prosecuting political corruption — mostly targeting members of his own party. He hasn’t faltered under constant public attacks from Republican legislators in Texas, who have threatened to cut the funds for his Public Integrity Unit. And he has taken his fight to the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times when Republicans in Congress have criticized him.

On the stand Monday the avuncular Ceverha used the Bernie Ebbers (former WorldCom CEO) defense, pleading ignorance of the day-to-day operations of the organization he directed. Decisions were made by DeLay’s handpicked operatives, Ceverha insisted; he had nothing to do with running the PAC while he served as treasurer. (Much of his defense was a calculated attempt to hold the already indicted Colyandro responsible for most of the PAC’s decisions.) The argument was credible. After all, the most culpable defendants had managed to avoid their day in court by getting themselves indicted on criminal charges. Their day will probably occur sometime this summer.

Back in 1996 DeLay got a walk in a fundraising scandal involving a front group known as Triad. That scandal cost a Texas businessman $400,000 in fines and resulted in an FBI investigation. But what the FBI turned up was never revealed because then-House Government Reform chairman Dan Burton, R-Ind., blocked attempts by the ranking Democrat on the Committee, Henry Waxman, D-Calif., to subpoena the FBI notes and files.

Now the story of the fundraising operation known as DeLay Inc. might not have such a happy ending. While he got a pass in Washington in the Triad affair, DeLay might be doing a perp walk in 2005 in Austin, where three of his fundraisers may be headed for the Big Rodeo and the corporations that wrote checks will be dragged before a jury on charges of making illegal political contributions. And there’s more. Two of the majority leader’s closest associates in Washington could soon be facing federal indictments for an Indian gaming scandal. Both have already been called to appear before a Senate committee, which held its first hearing on the Indian lobby fee scandal earlier this week.

Ronnie Earle, the district attorney who has held office for a quarter of a century in the Texas capital, indicted the three DeLay associates and eight corporations for soliciting and making illegal campaign contributions in September. DeLay’s recent Texas dealings look like the Peter Cloeren story on a grand scale. More recently, DeLay and his Washington political operative Jim Ellis devised a much larger scheme to move money from corporations into the campaigns of Republican candidates for the Texas state House, which had been in Democratic hands for 130 years. With a Republican majority in the House, they eliminated the only obstacle stopping DeLay from presiding over the redrawing of the state’s congressional district maps to create as many as seven seats likely to be won by Republicans.

Ellis, his Texas connection Jim Colyrando, and Warren Robold, a Washington fundraiser who worked for DeLay’s political action committee, found corporate funding “vehicles” all over the country. The corporate donors were willing to invest in Texas state House races where they did little or no business in order to cultivate the favor of the majority leader. Donors were even assured that their contributions were “non-disclosable according to relevant state laws.” And the contributions weren’t disclosed in Texas. Texans for a Republican Majority (TRMPAC) listed corporate contributions only with the IRS.

There was one problem with the scheme. It’s against the law to donate or spend corporate money on political campaigns in Texas. When the Austin district attorney realized what was going on he began an investigation. As the second grand jury that looked at the case concluded its extended term in mid-September, he handed down his indictments. DeLay didn’t make the cut. But Earle seems to be employing what might be called a proctological prosecution strategy, a back-door approach that might yet lead to the majority leader himself.

One letter from a corporate donor points directly toward DeLay — at least in its salutation, where a vice president of an Oklahoma natural gas company writes: “Dear Congressman DeLay: I am pleased to forward our contribution of $25,000 for the TRMPAC that we pledged at the June 2, 2002 fundraiser.” The letter is an exhibit in a civil suit filed against TRMPAC. It’s likely the D.A. will also have it and others like it. Williams Company Inc., the corporation that made the contribution, was one of the eight indicted in Austin.

Two weeks after DeLay’s associates were indicted in Texas, the Senate Indian Affairs Committee began an investigation of two DeLay associates who billed six Indian tribes a staggering $66 million in lobbying fees, after promising tribal leaders that their proximity to DeLay equaled unparalleled influence in Washington. The story, broken by Shawn Martin at the quite literally backwater American Press in Lake Charles, La., less than a year ago, quickly found its way to the front page of the Washington Post.

Jack Abramoff, a member of DeLay’s “kitchen cabinet,” and DeLay’s former press secretary Mike Scanlon billed their Indian clients twice as much as companies such as General Electric paid for outside lobbyists in the same time period. The tribes were paying the two Washington operatives — who in private e-mails referred to the Indians as “troglodytes,” “monkeys” and “moronic” — to defend their casinos. Two U.S. attorneys in Washington and a federal grand jury are also looking into Abramoff and Scanlon, who are not only frequent fliers to gaming reservations around the country but also frequent contributors to Republican candidates and think tanks.

When the story broke, DeLay denounced his longtime friend Abramoff, telling reporters that Abramoff had never been on his payroll. He also warned anyone using his name to attract lobby clients to “stop it immediately.” The warning came a little too late for tribal leaders slickered by Abramoff and Scanlon.

Everybody has lawyered up. Nobody’s talking — except when compelled to do so by state and federal prosecutors and the investigator that Sen. John McCain has assigned from the Senate Indian Affairs Committee to the case. And the upcoming 109th Congress is beginning to look like the longest two years in Tom DeLay’s political life.