[Vision2020] Both faces of Tom Delay

[Scott Dredge]

LOS ANGELES - House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who has
helped lead a congressional effort to keep Terri
Schiavo alive, joined members of his own family nearly
17 years ago in allowing doctors not to take
extraordinary measures to extend his father's life, a
newspaper reported Sunday.

DeLay had just been re-elected to his third term in
Congress in 1988 when his father, Charles DeLay, was
severely injured in an accident. As the elder DeLay's
vital organs began failing, the family chose not to
connect him to a dialysis machine or take other
measures to prolong his life, the Los Angeles Times
reported Sunday, citing court documents, medical
records and interviews with family members.

"There was no point to even really talking about it,"
Maxine DeLay, the congressman's 81-year-old mother,
told the Times. "Tom knew, we all knew, his father
wouldn't have wanted to live that way."

DeLay helped push through Congress a special law
allowing Terri Schiavo's parents to ask federal courts
to order their brain-damaged daughter's feeding tube
reinserted after state courts allowed it to be
removed. However, after hearing their pleas, federal
judges refused to intervene.

The Texas Republican also accused Schiavo's husband
and the courts of "an act of barbarism" against
Schiavo, who doctors say is in a persistent vegetative
state.

The congressman declined to be interviewed about his
father's case, but a press aide said it was "entirely
different than Terri Schiavo's."

"The only thing keeping her alive is the food and
water we all need to survive. His father was on a
ventilator and other machines to sustain him," said
DeLay spokesman Dan Allen.

Charles DeLay, 65, and his brother and their wives
were trying out a tram the brothers had built to carry
their families up and down a slope from their Texas
home to the shore of a lake when the tram jumped the
tracks on Nov. 17, 1988.

Charles DeLay was pitched headfirst into a tree.
Hospital admission records showed he suffered multiple
injuries, including a brain hemorrhage.

Doctors advised that he would "basically be a
vegetable," said the congressman's aunt, JoAnne DeLay,
who suffered broken bones in the crash.

Like Schiavo, Charles DeLay had no living will, but he
had reportedly expressed to others his wish not to be
kept alive by artificial means.

He died on Dec. 14, 1988. He hadn't shown any signs of
being conscious, except that his pulse rate would rise
slightly when younger son Randall entered the room,
Maxine DeLay said.

"There was no chance he was ever coming back," she
said of her husband.