Recap: despite obviously fatal legal troubles, vanity and greed made Tom DeLay run for office this year anyway, and won the GOP primary, making him the sole Republican candidate on the ballot. When it became even more clear that he would have to get out of Dodge, he tried a slick trick to evade responsibility: move out of state, invalidating his candidacy–essentially allowing the GOP to hand-pick a candidate, invalidating the choice of the voters (gee, doesn’t that sound familiar?).

The problem? DeLay didn’t sell his Texas home, and on top of that, the “non-inhabitant-on-election-day” trap door was a legal fiction invented by the GOP to illegally subvert a legal election (they love subverting elections, don’t they?). A local Texas judge ruled against him, meaning he would stay on the ballot as the GOP contender for his district. The uber-conservative 5th Circuit upheld the lower court, and now, ultra-uber-conservative Justice Scalia, acting for the Supreme Court out of session, upheld the 5th Circuit.

Now, remember, Tom DeLay engineered the whole extra-census gerrymandering in Texas that led to many seats being yanked out from under Democrats and put into GOP hands.

So how does the GOP react to the current situation? The attorney for the Texas Republican Party Chairman, who is arguing DeLay’s case, put it this way:

Whatever action might be taken, “we’re not going to let the Democrats steal this seat,” Bopp said.

Is that just about the richest thing you’ve ever heard, or what? If the GOP takes seats by arbitrary gerrymandering, it’s legit–but if the GOP can’t illegally weasel out of a mess it created and a Democratic candidate wins in a popular election because the GOP candidate is a crime-breaking scumbag, then the Democrat is “stealing” the seat.

Sometimes the sheer audacity of Republican politicians and lawyers is simply dazzling.