Politics & Power Quote by Tom DeLay

DeLay is doing something very American and very Washington at once: elevating himself above the bureaucracy while wrapping that elevation in the flag of first principles. “I am not a federal employee” draws a hard line between faceless government functionaries and a chosen few with a supposedly higher mandate. It’s not just semantic hair-splitting; it’s a status claim designed to preempt accountability. If you’re an “employee,” you can be managed, disciplined, even fired. If you’re a “constitutional officer,” the chain of command runs upward to History, not to ethics committees or administrative rules.

The repetition is the tell. Three times he denies the ordinary category (“employee”) and three times he asserts proximity to the sacred text (“Constitution”). “My job is the Constitution” isn’t a description of duties so much as a rhetorical shield: criticism becomes not a challenge to DeLay’s conduct but an attack on the document itself. The line “I am in the Constitution” is the most revealing move, collapsing a role into an identity, as if officeholding confers personal imprimatur. It’s self-credentialing by text message from the Founders.

The context matters: DeLay made a career of hardball partisanship and faced repeated ethical scrutiny in the early 2000s. This kind of language functions as inoculation. It reframes oversight as petty harassment by “government” against someone who claims to embody the nation’s legitimate authority. It’s a power play dressed up as civics: constitutional rhetoric deployed not to limit power, but to launder it.