This NY Times article and this WaPo article are reporting that Houston Congressman and former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay will announce today that he is leaving Congress and pulling out of his ongoing re-election bid. Earlier posts on DeLay’s mounting troubles over the past couple of years are here. Although DeLay won the Republican primary last month in his re-election bid, he still faced a tough re-election race against former Rep. Nick Lampson in November.
Once one of the most powerful politicians in Washington, DeLay was indicted in Travis County (Austin) last year for his role in allegedly routing illegal campaign contributions into Texas during the 2002 elections that followed a controversial redistricting effort in Texas that cemented Republican dominance of the Texas Congressional delegation. DeLay is also at the center of an increasingly broad Justice Department corruption probe of former Republican lobbyist and top DeLay fundraiser Jack Abramoff and former DeLay aides. Two of DeLay’s former aides have pleaded guilty in the investigation and Abramoff was sentenced last week to over five years in prison after copping a plea deal earlier. DeLay has not yet been accused of a crime in the probe, but he appears to be a target of the ongoing investigation.
However, even if DeLay is not charged, he clearly displayed poor judgment in his personnel decisions. As this Wall Street Journal ($) editorial observed today:

What caused this outbreak of greed is impossible to know for sure. Clearly a sense of entitlement set in among some Republicans, who forgot why they were elected and began to believe that power was its own reward. We can recall when Republicans, back in the early 1990s, proposed to reduce the size of their Capitol Hill staffs in order to reduce the scope of Congressional mischief. That idea went away pretty fast once they became a majority.

Could this be the reason?