Tom DeLay hasn’t quite yet shuffled off history’s stage, but with yesterday’s announcement that he won’t stand for reelection this November but resign his house seat within months it’s time to step back and take some stock of his role in history.

When DeLay sat down with Time’s Mike Allen earlier this week to discuss his decision to retire, he said, “I can do more on the outside of the House than I can on the inside right now.

“I want to continue to fight for the conservative cause. I want to continue to work for a Republican majority.”

DeLay even suggested he’d soon be taking a job with a conservative advocacy organization somewhere in Northern Virginia.

Such a turn of events would be in line with DeLay’s apotheosis with some on the religious right. Only last week, the Rev. Rick Scarborough compared DeLay’s three-year losing struggle against a forest of ethics charges and indictments to a form of Christian martyrdom. “God always does his best work right after a crucifixion,” he told listeners, symbolically toasting DeLay off into his post-congressional career.

But I doubt very much that history will look back on DeLay as a conservative or think that conservatism — in whatever sense you choose to construe the term — defined his career.

That last line of DeLay’s quote is the key one — or at least closest to the truth: “I want to continue to work for a Republican majority.”

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t doubt that Tom DeLay hated the Environmental Protection Agency or the left. I won’t even gainsay his oh-so-conspicuous religiosity.

But DeLay’s career, in all its phases and respects, was about power. He was a machine politician through and through. His conservatism, while genuine, was a secondary part aspect of his political character.

Temperamentally and ideologically, Tom DeLay was already a fire breather when he came to the House in 1985. But temperament and ideology weren’t necessarily his guiding star. In 1989, the first President Bush tapped House Republican Whip Dick Cheney (Wyo.) to serve as secretary of defense. That created the opening for then-backbencher Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) to make his play for a post in the party leadership.

But DeLay didn’t back Newt. He backed moderate Illinoisan Ed Madigan, protégé of then-House Minority Leader Bob Michel. In fact, DeLay not only backed Madigan, he ran his campaign. DeLay made a calculated decision to run against type because he thought it was a surer way to climb the greasy pole of congressional leadership. He lost.

Of course, Gingrich, with all his bombast and grandiosity, was Speaker of the House within five years of that election. But while Gingrich put the rudiments of what would become the K Street Project in place, it was DeLay who understood its potential and had the temperament and skills to make it run.

While Newt was fulminating against the welfare state and counterculture values, DeLay was building a political machine — one designed to lock in the newly won Republican dominance for decades to come.

The model was simple and ruthlessly enforced. It was not so much to horde all the money for the GOP as it was to cut off the supply of money to Democrats. The long-term part of the plan was to create a personnel conveyor belt from Capitol Hill to K Street.

Trade associations would have to hire Republicans to staff their D.C. lobbying operations. That created big-ticket salaries for a generation of former Hill staffers — money that could then be recycled back into GOP campaign coffers. Soon DeLay would look out on a K Street made up not of Democrats or nonideological lobbyists but a sea of former staffers, most of whom in one fashion or another owed him and his machine their jobs.

As Nicholas Confessore argued in a seminal article in The Washington Monthly in the summer of 2003, this led not to a K Street that owned the Republican majority, as is commonly argued, but a Republican machine that owned and controlled K Street, with all the oceans of money it had at its disposal.

The first acid test of the machine Tom built came in 1998 with the drive for impeachment. On its surface, that may seem like an example of conservative principle par excellence, but it was more a sign of DeLay’s great motivating drive — payback against partisan enemies — in this case, Bill Clinton.

Of course, it took the second President Bush’s elevation to White House to really put the machine to work. Not coincidentally, that was when the criminality really got rolling at full speed — since Republicans had the whole city wired. Few of Bush’s accomplishments would have been possible without the iron party discipline created by the DeLay machine.

But as even many more principled conservatives have ruefully observed in recent years, the power of the machine was directed less at ideologically principled goals than toward using the power of government, and the money at the disposal of government, to reinforce the ruling party’s hold on power and reward its key donors — which, in turn, accomplished the same end.

In his moment of disgrace, Tom DeLay wants to be Mr. Conservative. History will remember him as a latter-day Boss Tweed. But it will remember him.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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