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DeLay gives up bid to reclaim US House post
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2006-01-08 09:22

At a news conference in Texas, DeLay said he had called Hastert, R-Ill., on Saturday to inform him of his decision. "Our success in lowering taxes, creating jobs, growing the economy and providing effective national security was helped by Tom Delay's leadership," the speaker said in a statement.

The 58-year-old DeLay, an exterminator before his election to Congress in 1984, said he intends to seek re-election next fall. "I plan to run a very vigorous campaign and I plan to win it," he told reporters in Texas.

The voters aside, his political future will hinge not only on the outcome of the Texas allegations, but on the future of the Abramoff investigation.

Michael Scanlon, a former DeLay aide and an Abramoff business partner, pleaded guilty in the fall to corruption charges. In court papers, the lobbyist said he had once paid $50,000 to the wife of another former DeLay aide to help kill legislation opposed by his clients.

DeLay has been a fixture in the Republican leadership since the GOP won its majority in the 1994 election landslide.

An outsider at first, he muscled his way up the hierarchy when he won election as whip over the hand-picked choice of then-Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga.

When Gingrich nearly fell in a coup more than three years later, DeLay went before fellow Republicans at a private meeting and emotionally confessed his role in the plotting. He prospered politically, moving up to become majority leader, the No. 2 post, in 1999.

Contrition was never a quality he displayed to his adversaries — Democrats, outside interest groups and others who sought to check the advance of the conservative GOP agenda he promoted.

DeLay raised millions of dollars for the campaigns of fellow House Republicans, conservatives and moderates alike, earning their gratitude regardless of their ideology. He courted controversy almost reflexively, including his involvement in an attempt to force corporations and industry groups to hire more Republican lobbyists.

He rarely backed down.

DeLay was the driving force behind former US President Clinton's impeachment in 1999, weeks after Republicans lost seats at the polls in a campaign in which they tried to make an issue of Clinton's personal behavior.
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