By now you’ve probably read these Tom DeLay quotes about his goal of destroying the judicial branch :

“I blame Congress over the last 50 to 100 years for not standing up and taking its responsibility given to it by the Constitution. The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a separation of church and state that’s nowhere in the Constitution is that Congress didn’t stop them. The reason we had judicial review is because Congress didn’t stop them. The reason we had a right to privacy is because Congress didn’t stop them.”

“We’re having to change a whole culture in this — a culture created by law schools,” he went on. “People really believe that these are nine gods, and that all wisdom is vested in them.”

But that’s just part of his plans. As Salon’s War Room notes, DeLay wants to overhaul the entire government :

During an interview in his Capitol Hill office with staff from the conservative Washington Times, DeLay suggested that the time was ripe to give the U.S. government an extreme makeover: “What I find the most important is to redesign the government, now that we have the opportunity to do that.”

“I started an effort to redesign the Appropriations Committee,” he noted, “to make it harder to spend — to make it easier to spend on our priorities and harder to spend on the Democrats’ priorities.”

Add to this DeLay’s central role in gerrymandering and the lesson is clear : The goal of the Republican party is to turn the United States into a one-party state. The more I see the GOP twist the levers of government to concentrate their power, the more I’m reminded of this bit from the 1946 educational film “Despotism” (which I wrote about a year and a half ago here) :

A power scale is another important yardstick of despotism. It gauges the citizen’s share in making the community’s decisions. Communities which concentrate decision making in a few hands rate low on a power scale and are moving towards despotism. Like France under the Bourbon kings, one of whom said, “The state? I am the state.”



The test of despotic power is that it can disregard the will of the people. It rules without the consent of the governed.Look beyond the legal formalities of an election in measuring a community on the power scale to see if the ballot is really free.

If the citizens can vote only the way they are told, a community approaches despotism. When legislatures become ceremonial assemblies only, and have no real control over lawmaking, their community rates low on a power scale.

And before you even jump to the “one bad apple” defense, let me remind you of that DeLay isn’t just any Republican. He’s the Majority Leader in the House of Representatives. And it wasn’t seniority that got him there either. He was chosen by his peers to lead the House GOP caucus. For all the half-hearted backpedaling some Republicans are now doing, it’s important to keep in mind that DeLay is only doing the job the party wanted him to do.