Just wow. This is breath-taking in it's scope and audacity. Seems that former homemaker Christine Delay was quite the rain-maker in La Famiglia Delay.

A registered lobbyist opened a retirement account in the late 1990s for the wife of then-House Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) and contributed thousands of dollars to it while also paying her a salary to work for him from her home in Texas, according to sources, documents and DeLay's attorney, Richard Cullen.

The account represents a small portion of the income that DeLay's family received from entities at least partly controlled by lobbyist Edwin A. Buckham. But the disclosure of its origin adds to what was previously known about the benefits DeLay's family received from its association with Buckham, and it brings the total over the past seven years to about half a million dollars.

Buckham was DeLay's chief of staff before he became a lobbyist at the end of 1998, shortly before the account was opened and the flow of funds began. He has come under scrutiny from federal investigators because his lobbying firm received hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue from clients of indicted Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

From 1998 until recently, Buckham, an evangelical minister, met regularly with DeLay, occasionally attended staff meetings in his office, made scheduling recommendations or decisions for the office, and served as DeLay's chief political and spiritual adviser, even though he was not formally employed by him. At the time, Buckham's clients included a host of companies with regulatory and legislative business before Congress, and whose interests DeLay supported.

Under congressional ethics rules, lobbyists such as Buckham are barred from providing gifts or gratuities with a total value exceeding $50 to lawmakers in a single year. No similar prohibition exists for payments to a lawmaker's family members, but the pay must be a reasonable wage for real work and not be meant to influence a lawmaker's votes. Nothing in pending House and Senate lobbying reform legislation addresses the issue of such lobbyist payments to lawmaker's families.

Besides financing the retirement account, Buckham played a role in two other streams of income that indirectly benefited DeLay.

One involved payments to DeLay's family by his principal political action committee, Americans for a Republican Majority (ARMPAC), which drew its largest donations from corporations. Three former DeLay staffers with firsthand knowledge of Buckham's activities have described him as a decision maker for the group, even though it was formally run by its executive director.

An arm of the group paid Buckham a monthly consulting fee, and Buckham in turn employed its executive director as a consultant to his lobbying firm. The two of them shared a single office on the top floor of a townhouse owned by a nonprofit organization that Buckham created and directed. Buckham's role is relevant because from 2001 to Jan. 31, 2006, ARMPAC paid Christine DeLay; DeLay's daughter, Dani DeLay Ferro; and Ferro's Texas firm a total of $350,304 in political consulting fees and expenses, according to public records.

The Washington Post previously disclosed that from 1998 to 2002, Buckham's lobbying firm, Alexander Strategy Group, paid Christine DeLay a monthly salary averaging between $3,200 and $3,400. Cullen initially said the payments were for telephone calls she made periodically to the offices of certain members of Congress seeking the names of their favorite charities. Christine DeLay then forwarded that information to Buckham, along with some information about those charities.

Christine Delay- "Hi, this is Speaker Tom's wife! I need to know congress critter X's favorite charity. Every call I make, ensures that money goes to my favorite charity, Tom'n'Me!! Yeah, calling to find their favorite charity for $3,400 a month from home. What, she got that idea off of one of those "work at home" infomercials?

Last week, Cullen said the payments were also for general political consulting Christine DeLay provided to her husband. Cullen said he does not have complete records of the salary payments or the dates when Christine DeLay performed the work from the couple's home in Sugar Land, Tex. But a source familiar with the pay records said the total she received from the Alexander Strategy Group was about $115,000.

Together with the retirement account worth about $25,000, this means the family's total financial benefits from entities at least partly controlled by Buckham exceeded $490,300.

Before being paid by ARMPAC for political consulting, Christine DeLay, a homemaker and advocate for foster care, had not done paid work of that type. That circumstance has figured in government investigations of payments to other lawmakers' spouses, on the grounds that, if the compensation began after a lawmaker's election, it might have been meant to influence official acts.

I'm guessing that no legislation is going to cover this egregious loophole now or ever. Delay used it, William Jefferson allegedly used it to extract money from donors/those with business before him in one way or another.

The only way to change is to humiliate and arrest enough of these "public servants" until they law is changed and like little kids they are all "penalized" for the behaviour of a miscreant few because they can't seem to stop feeding at the trough of corruption long enough to realize what it's doing to the Republic.