He's back!!! Tom DeLay: I have a ‘right’ to not serve gay sinners

[Rob H.]

20. He's okay with forced abortions and inhumane working conditions, though

Jack Abramoff CNMI scandal

In testimony before the Senate, it was described that 91% of the private-sector workforce were immigrants, and were being paid barely half the U.S. minimum hourly wage. Stories also emerged of workers forced to live behind barbed wire in squalid shacks without plumbing. A Department of the Interior report found that "Chinese women were subject to forced abortions and that women and children were subject to forced prostitution in the local sex-tourism industry." The Senate passed the Murkowski worker reform bill unanimously. The bill was then blocked by Tom DeLay in the house.

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Abramoff later arranged an all-expenses paid trip to Saipan for Tom DeLay on New Year's Eve in 1997. Although House ethics rules at the time prohibited House members from accepting such gifts from lobbyists, the trip was funded directly by the CNMI and thus was technically allowable. An internal memo from Preston, Gates, and Ellis stated that these sort of trips are "one of the most effective ways to build permanent friends on the Hill." While on the trip, at a benefit dinner for Willie Tan of Tan Holdings Corporation, DeLay was quoted as saying:

"When one of my closest and dearest friends, Jack Abramoff, your most able representative in Washington, D.C., invited me to the islands, I wanted to see firsthand the free-market success and the progress and reform you have made." [7]

An undercover investigation by ABC News captured Willie Tan speaking on a hidden camera about a conversation with DeLay about labor reform laws. According to Tan, &quot DeLay) said, 'Willie, if they elect me majority whip, I make the schedule of the Congress, and I'm not going to put it on the schedule.' So Tom told me, 'Forget it, Willie. No chance.'"

After the trip, Abramoff helped DeLay craft policy that extended exemptions from federal immigration and mimimum-wage labor laws to Saipan industries, though the island is part of the U.S. Commonwealth. Brian Ross at ABC News for 20/20 on March 13, 1998 alleged that factories on Saipan have forced their workers to have abortions in order to keep their jobs.