Congresswoman Jean Schidt has come out swinging defending former House Majority Leader Tom Delay in the Loveland Magazine:

The Congresswoman said she was not going to return the money that Texas Congressman Tom DeLay gave her campaign. “Even if I return it, someone is still going to remind everyone that I took it in the first place. So, for some people it wouldn’t make a difference.”

She also said that DeLay hasn’t yet been found guilty of anything. “He has only been charged with a crime by a Texas Prosecutor who is thinking about his own election in Texas.” She said Prosecutor Ronnie Earl went after Delay because he is so powerful and has built a huge following of other conservative House members in Washington. Schmidt’s office is across the hall and four doors down from DeLay’s.

Schmidt said she did not receive any of the money DeLay is accused of conspiring to “launder” from Texas businesses, through the Republican National Committee, and back to other Texas Republican hopefuls running for a seat in the Texas State House. Critics say it was these State office holders, that once elected, pushed through a scheme to divide Texas voting districts in a way that favored the election of Republicans to the U.S. House. “So, by hoping to bring down Tom DeLay, Ronnie Earl hopes to break up and destroy Delay’s power and national influence. Delay has been very good at pushing the conservative agenda in Washington,” Schmidt said. She also said the public would be hearing more about Earl’s own behavior, in the near future.


I wonder if this tough talk also applies to the members of the grand juries that issued the indictments.

BTW, one of the ways that Tom Delay is “pushing the conservative agenda” is by protecting sweat-shops in the U.S. territory of the Northern Mariana Islands:

Because they were produced in a territory of the United States, garments traveled tariff-free and quota-free to the profitable U.S. market and were entitled to display the coveted “Made in the USA” label.

Among the manufacturers that had profited from the un-free labor market on the island were Tommy Hilfiger USA, Gap, Calvin Klein and Liz Claiborne.

Moved by the sworn testimony of U.S. officials and human-rights advocates that the 91 percent of the workforce who were immigrants — from China, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh — were being paid barely half the U.S. minimum hourly wage and were forced to live behind barbed wire in squalid shacks minus plumbing, work 12 hours a day, often seven days a week, without any of the legal protections U.S. workers are guaranteed, Murkowski wrote a bill to extend the protection of U.S. labor and minimum-wage laws to the workers in the U.S. territory of the Northern Marianas.

So compelling was the case for change the Alaska Republican marshaled that in early 2000, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed the Murkowski worker reform bill.

But one man primarily stopped the U.S. House from even considering that worker-reform bill: then-House Republican Whip Tom DeLay. (more…)


Perhaps this is Jean Schmidt’s vision for Ohio.