Tom DeLay

Reporters Who Know DeLay Best: Quadriplegic Tale Is New To Us

Justin Elliott | August 20, 2009, 6:46PM

Two journalists who've covered Tom DeLay extensively over the years tell TPMmuckraker they've never heard of his story about protesters at a health care town hall in the 80s who "brought in quadriplegics on gurneys and dumped them on the floor in front of my podium."

"Jan Reid and I (and a researcher) spent a full year, reading clips and running down sources. Nowhere did I see any mention of quadriplegics brought in on gurneys," Lou Dubose, co-author of The Hammer: God, Money, and the Rise of the Republican Congress, tells TPMmuckraker in an e-mail. "We would have used if we had it."

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Tom DeLay

Tom DeLay

Does DeLay's Angry Quadriplegic Town Hall Protesters Tale Add Up?

Justin Elliott | August 20, 2009, 4:25PM

Last night on Hardball, Chris Matthews asked an exuberant Tom DeLay about the Tea Party/Birther agitation bubbling up around the country.

DeLay gave this response, which piqued our interest:

Chris, you shouldn't be surprised about this. This has been going on forever. When I did my town hall meetings, I'll never forget one back in the '80s -- on health care, by the way. They brought in quadriplegics on gurneys and dumped them on the floor in front of my podium. I mean, this is not new. What's new is, the people that came into disrupt my town meetings, we just let them go on because it usually turned off the people that were there. What's happening here is the American people are on their side.

Wild stuff. Sounds like the town hall protest of the decade -- but did it actually happen?

Here at TPMmuckraker, we scoured news archives for such an incident -- and called around, including to DeLay's spokeswoman, who has not responded to questions about the episode.

Then we got a look at a May 1996 article from the Houston Chronicle about a series of protests by the disabilities advocacy group ADAPT, brought to our attention by Democratic consultant Peter Lindstrom.

It begins like this:

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Tom DeLay