Ney to Follow DeLay?Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) hit a defiant note today, but it seems worth mentioning that the time is ripe for Ney’s exit stage right. Tom DeLay stepped aside soon after a former aide of his, Tony Rudy, pled guilty. He could afford to do so, he said, because he’d won his party’s primary, clearing the way for the GOP to hand-pick a strong successor.
Well, Ney has won his party’s primary, and now his former chief of staff Neil Volz has implicated him in a far more serious way than Rudy did DeLay. And he’s turned what has been a reliably Republican district into the most vulnerable - according to recent polling, he’s trailing his Democratic challenger. This was precisely the point when DeLay bailed.
Let’s see if Ney sticks with it; Volz’s long-awaited guilty plea finally clears the way for prosecutors to bring their indictment. But, ironman that he is, Ney has said that even that won’t knock him out. Can anything stop him?
Update: Another document released by prosecutors, Volz’s “Factual Proffer” has a fuller accounting of Representative #1’s work for Abramoff, most of it repeated from prior guilty pleas.