No Delaying DeLay

For the American Left in general and House Donks in particular, who were dancing in the streets last week when the House Majority Leader was served up a laughably empty and nakedly partisan criminal indictment, this can't possibly be what they were expecting, still less wanting, to hear:

Representative Tom DeLay pledged on Sunday to take an active role in the Republican leadership despite being forced out as majority leader because of criminal conspiracy charges in Texas.

DeLay, who last week stepped aside temporarily from the #2 job in the House, said he will continue his close partnership with House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-IL.

Asked whether he would return to the GOP leadership, DeLay said, "Well, I hope so. I can do my job with or without the title. That doesn't concern me."

You know, come to think of it, I could be wrong in my initial assessment. For Democrats these days, wishful thinking has completely subsumed sober, objective analysis, so they may well be thrilled that DeLay will still have a prominent role in the House GOP leadership, since that will play into their already existent plans to use him as a 2006 campaign piñata.

In which case it will be yet another rake in the face for the minority party. It stands to reason that if DeLay or the rest of the Republican top brass in the House thought that there was any legitimate downside to the once and future Majority Leader sticking around - and please bear in mind the legendary GOP propensity for fleeing to the tall grass at the slightest sign of real or imagined trouble - they would have already drop-kicked him not just out of the leadership but probably his congressional seat as well. If the Hammer is sticking around, and as "the man behind the green curtain," to borrow a Ron White line, "there's no anxiety there, is there?"

Of course, that would mean that the man who was so cluelessly tin-eared as to declare, just a few weeks ago, that there was "no place left to cut" in the federal budget - not to mention the man, after President Bush, most responsible for inflicting the prescription drug boondoggle and its $7 trillion unfunded liability onto American taxpayers - would still be at least helping to call the shots. And that profligate mindset is a greater hazard to continued Republican rule than an army of Ronnie Earles.

That's what makes this development so encouraging (via Cap'n Ed):

The House passed legislation yesterday that could greatly expand private-property rights under the Endangered Species Act, the 1973 law that is credited with helping keep the bald eagle from extinction but that has also provoked bitter opposition.

By a vote of 229-193, lawmakers approved a revision of the act, perhaps the nation's most powerful environmental law. The law has led to battles over species such as the Northern spotted owl, the snail darter and the red-legged frog. ...

The bill would require the government to compensate property owners if measures to protect species thwart development plans. It would also give political appointees the power to make some scientific determinations and stop "critical habitat" designations, which limit development.

The changes were pushed through by House Resources Committee Chairman Richard W. Pombo. The California rancher contends that the current rules unduly burden landowners and lead to costly lawsuits while doing too little to save plants and animals.

Many Democrats and moderate Republicans said Pombo's bill would eliminate important protections for species and lead to large government handouts to property owners. A White House statement yesterday supported the bill. But it noted that payments to property owners could have a "significant" impact on the budget.

Mule fritters. All this legislation would do is restore some semblance of balance between "species protection" and private property rights. More to the point, it would restore the ESA to its original ostensible purpose from the no-growth, confiscatory, stealth land-grabbing ecotyranny enviroMarxists long ago metastasized it into by attaching actual costs to their outrageous bureaucratic overreaching that will count in their budgets and be awfully hard to justify. And those costs, as the Cap'n notes, would include "the loss of any commercial value to [private] property under ESA enforcement, and not just only if all commercial value is lost."

Mr. Morrissey also adds the greater context of both the Kelo decision and how just such socialist rabblerousing under the cloak of "environmental protection" has, by preventing any refinery construction for the past thirty years (not to mention no nuclear power plant additions in almost as long), left us increasingly vulnerable to both the skyrocketing overseas demand for oil and the supply shocks that were incurred in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

In the context of this post, the Pombo bill seems to fit in with Tom DeLay's declaration on Fox News Sunday:

DeLay said the GOP leadership wants to act aggressively in the next eight weeks to push an agenda of lowering gas prices, cutting taxes and enforcing immigration laws.

I'd like some specifics on that first item, and really the whole thing remains to be seen. But seeing as how 'Pubbies on both sides of the Hill have pretty much pooped their pants on fiscal and immigration policy with their base anyway, they have little to lose from cleaning themselves up, changing trousers, and getting back into the game.

And their chances of success won't be hindered with the Hammer still in the starting rotation.