DeLay makes the right decision

Tom DeLay may well be the victim of a partisan prosecution in Texas that will fail. He may never be indicted in the burgeoning Jack Abramoff scandal.

But even if the former House majority leader is legally clean, he had long since become political poison for the Republican Party. This is why he is doing his party a big favor by not trying to win back his House leadership post.

Even before he stepped down "temporarily" last year in the wake of his Texas money-laundering indictment, DeLay's close ties to Abramoff and other morally challenged lobbyists, his push-the-envelope fund-raising tactics, and his take-no-prisoners political wars made him one of the least liked, and most feared, politicians in Washington.

It would have been a disaster for Republicans - especially after Abramoff copped a plea on bribery and corruption charges last week - had DeLay been reinstated as majority leader. How easy that would have made it during this election year for Democrats and their media allies to paint DeLay and Abramoff as the face of the GOP in Congress. They'll probably try that anyway, but with DeLay out of his high-profile leadership post, it will be more difficult to carry off.

It also should be noted that DeLay was not all that popular with many fiscal conservatives. Under his leadership, House Republicans eschewed their traditional commitment to spending restraint and small government. For instance, in the 1998 transportation bill, Congress approved 1,850 "earmarks" - a euphemism for pork; last year's transportation bill contained 6.371 earmarks. DeLay was just as big an exponent of big spending as liberal Democrats - it's just that his spending priorities were different.

Now the air is filled with bipartisan congressional cries for anti-corruption lobbyist reform. "The best long-term answer to corruption," says Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., "is a smaller government." Those are words for Republicans to live by.