Now Republicans Control the Courts, Too

By Kelly Candaele and Peter Dreier, TomPaine.com. Posted July 13, 2006.

News reports about three recent court decisions -- Texas gerrymandering, labor violations by Ralphs supermarket chain and President George W. Bush's treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo -- make it appear that justice prevailed and the wrong-doers got their comeuppance. But the opposite is true.

Instead, these rulings reveal why the Republican Congress, the Bush administration and big business are so effective at getting what they want. They have an “obey when convenient” approach to our laws and judicial system. They break them when it suits their purposes, hoping that either they won't get caught or, if they do, that the punishment will be a slap on the wrist. In other words, they don't ask for permission. They ask for forgiveness.

On June 28, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Texas legislature had illegally gerrymandered a Texas congressional district by removing 100,000 Latinos from it to guarantee a safe Republican seat. The court told the Texas legislature to go back and redo the district. Republican Congressman Tom DeLay, the former House Majority Leader, set the stage for this redistricting by illegally raising corporate money which he funneled into the campaigns of Republican candidates for the state legislature in 2002. Thanks in large measure to these illegal campaign contributions, the GOP captured control of the Texas legislature and in 2003 redrew the map of the state's congressional districts. As a result, in the 2004 elections, the Republicans gained six Texas congressional seats that had previously been held by Democrats. Under the old map, Texas Republicans held only 15 of the state's 32 seats in Congress. After DeLay redrew the map, Republicans held 21 seats. This helped solidify the GOP's majority in Congress.

It is now clear that DeLay's redistricting chicanery was part of a web of corruption, linked to his friend and lobbyist Jack Abramoff, his congressional staffers-turned-lobbyists, and other sordid influence peddlers. Last year, a Texas judge ruled that DeLay's Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee (TRMPAC) had violated state law by not disclosing over $600,000 worth of fundraising money and a federal grand jury indicted TRMPAC for accepting illegal political contributions. A federal grand jury also indicted two DeLay aides for illegal acceptance of corporate political contributions.

For their misdeeds, Abramoff is facing jail time, and DeLay was forced to resign his congressional seat and may, too, spend time behind bars. But the fruit of all this corruption is that, even if DeLay and his buddies wind up in the slammer, the Texas congressional delegation now has a substantial Republican majority, making it extremely difficult for the Democrats to take back the House. The Supreme Court ruled that one of the six gerrymandered congressional districts violated the Voting Rights Act, but failed to toss out the others that had been crafted by DeLay. In truth, none of them would have been created in the first place without DeLay's illegal use of corporate contributions. While DeLay never planned to quit the House or go to jail, many Republicans and their corporate allies view him as a martyr — or at least a sacrificial lamb — in the larger cause of controlling Congress. DeLay's demise, and last week's Supreme Court decision, doesn't undo the original sin: illegally soliciting corporate money to reverse the partisan make-up of Texas' congressional delegation.

In another recent case, the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles ruled that Ralphs, the giant supermarket chain, has to pay a $70 million fine for illegally hiring employees during a grocery workers’ strike in 2003 and 2004. Ralphs agreed to plead guilty to five felony charges included in the 53-count grand jury indictment against the corporation. Ralphs — which is owned by the Cincinnati-based Kroger Co., the nation's 21st largest company, with revenues of more than $60 billion — used fake names and Social Security numbers to secretly rehire about 1,000 locked-out workers during the longest and largest supermarket strike in U.S. history.

Kelly Candaele is a trustee of the Los Angeles Community College District. Peter Dreier is professor of public policy at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

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