See You in Court
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The indictment of the majority leader in the House, Tom DeLay, handed up yesterday is something that may end up being a good thing. Even at a time in our history when scandal-mongering has become a basic tool of politics, the drum-beat leading up to the indictment of Mr. DeLay has been astonishing and has been conducted even while the prosecutor, Ronnie Earle, stated, according to Mr. DeLay, that the majority leader wasn’t a target of his investigation. At some point the public is going to welcome the chance for this to be sorted out in front of an actual judge and, if it gets to that, the facts tried by an impartial jury of Mr. DeLay’s peers.
The charges center around the fact that the State of Texas prohibits corporations from contributing to candidates. Let us pause for a moment to say that the law itself is, by our lights, unconstitutional, violating almost every one of the prohibitions on the Congress that were contained in the First Amendment and extended, in the 14th amendment, to the States. It also violates the privileges or immunities clause of the 14th amendment, though the Supreme Court would have to overturn some precedents to put that little a bomb of a constitutional provision into use again as a curb on the abilities of the states to trifle with our liberties.
In any event, Mr. Earle alleges that Mr. DeLay conspired to pass corporate money from a political action committee to candidates for the state legislature via a branch of the Republican National Committee. According to the Associated Press, the indictment accused Mr. DeLay of “a conspiracy to ‘knowingly make a political contribution’ in violation of Texas law outlawing corporate contributions.” The allegation involved the acceptance by Mr. De-Lay’s Texans for a Republican Majority political action committee of $155,000 from companies, including, the Associated Press reported, Sears Roebuck, and the placement of the money in an account from which, according to the AP’s summary of the allegations, the PAC allegedly then wrote a $190,000 check to an arm of the Republican National Committee. The PAC, the AP’s summary of the indictment said, provided the committee “a document with the names of Texas State House candidates and the amounts they were supposed to received in donations.”
Mr. DeLay reacted to the indictment with a rousing statement of his innocence, and, while he stepped aside at least temporarily from his leadership posts, his fellow Republicans on the Hill gave him a vote of confidence. “He will fight this and we give him our utmost support,” the speaker, Dennis Hastert, was quoted by the AP as saying. It reported that the majority leader was certain the indictment would be dismissed. It’s a brave front in the face of a prosecutor with a reputation as a highly partisan figure, who got nowhere when he tried to bring against Senator Hutchison charges that were also set down as politically motivated.
Those of us who live in New York, however, know that charges of campaign finance shenanigans are serious matters, even if we believe the campaign finance laws are unconstitutional. We’ve just seen the head of the Democratic machine in Brooklyn ushered into court by his party cronies confident of acquittal only to be adjudged by a jury guilty of three felonies. We don’t mind saying we have a thousand times more confidence in the district attorney in Brooklyn, Charles Hynes, than we do in the district attorney in Texas, Mr. Earle. But the newspaper instinct ignites in us a certain reserve.
For some of us it seems like only yesterday that President Reagan’s labor secretary – Ray Donovan – was brought up on baseless charges. He was driven from Washington and eventually put on trial. And when he was acquitted, he walked out of court and uttered the immortal line, “Which office do I go to get my reputation back?” We live in an age in which it seems the place one has to go is to court and what one has to do is fight and win. We wish Mr. DeLay – who has been a great champion on Israel and the war, to name but two issues of importance to us – luck in the weeks ahead.