Taylor-Made Election Law

As a former counsel to Tom DeLay’s TRMPAC and as current counsel to the Texas Association of Business (TAB), Taylor has huge stakes in the criminal probe investigating whether these groups illegally spent $2.5 million in corporate money in 2002 to help Republicans take over the Texas House. How fitting that people who bankrolled these efforts now have hired Taylor to “clarify” laws that those groups flaunted. Taylor himself seemed to make this point by announcing his new clients during a recess in the civil trial of TRMPAC Treasurer Bill Ceverha.

Taylor’s best-known new client is Houston homebuilder Bob Perry, who bankrolled attacks by Swiftboat Veterans for Truth on John Kerry’s Vietnam record. During the 2002 campaign Perry contributed $396,000 to the 21 Republican House candidates backed by TRMPAC and emerged as the top donor to TAB’s PAC. Although Perry is in a league of his own as Texas’ No. 1 individual donor, all of Taylor’s clients enjoy ties to TRMPAC or Tom DeLay.

Fred Zeidman arguably owes his very job to yet another DeLay ethics scandal. Greenberg Traurig named Zeidman head of its embattled lobby practice last year after it fired DeLay protégé Jack Abramoff. Multiple investigations are examining what Abramoff did for the tens of millions of dollars that he billed to Native American tribes (see “K Street Croupiers,” TO, Nov. 19, 2004). Recently the National Journal reported evidence that Abramoff’s prior firm, Preston Ellis (a $25,000 TRMPAC donor), paid DeLay’s London hotel bills in 2002. This would violate U.S. House rules that bar lobbyists from paying travel costs for members of Congress

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