Rick Perry Could End Up Doing Time

DAILY BEAST

We finally found a political issue that unites liberals and conservatives. No, it’s not something that could benefit millions of Americans like raising the minimum wage. Instead, it’s the indictment of Texas Governor Rick Perry for his alleged abuse of power.

Who could’ve predicted that The New York Times and Brietbart.com would both label these criminal charges unjustified? Or that former Obama strategist David Axelrod would call the indictment “sketchy,” putting him on the same side of the issue as Ted Cruz, who praised Perry as a “man of integrity”?
No wonder Rick Perry views the charges as a “farce.” This probably explains why Perry’s mug shot looks less like a defendant in a criminal case and more like a profile photo for Match.com. In fact, after the mug shot was taken this week, Perry immediately went out for ice cream, which he boasted about on Twitter.



Yet despite Perry’s outward appearances, he surely knows these charges are dangerous. I don’t care how many so-called “legal pundits” tell you Perry has nothing to fear. Criminal defense lawyers I spoke to who are in the legal trenches on a daily basis made it clear to me that this case could result in a conviction. And the Texas Observer, which has been following this story far before the national media, agrees.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) (L) and Texas Governor Rick Perry stand together during a press conference at the front gate of Fort Hood. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images) (2014 Getty Images)

That’s why Perry has hired a team of high-powered lawyers to represent him, including two from Washington, D.C. And the head of Perry’s legal team is nationally known attorney Tony Buzbee, who is being paid $450 an hour by the State of Texas. Perry clearly isn’t putting his fate in the hands of his own version of “My Cousin Vinny.” (Although a Texas version called “My Cousin Cletus” would be hilarious.)
By now, you probably know what led to Perry’s indictment. Travis County District Attorney, Rosemary Lehmberg, who is a Democrat, was stopped by the police on suspicion of drunk driving on April 12, 2013. She was belligerent to the police and had a very high blood alcohol reading. Lehmberg ultimately pleaded guilty to driving while intoxicated. Perry demanded she resign. However, when two other DA’s during Perry’s time as governor were convicted of drunk driving, he didn’t publicly call for them to resign. Why? Well, they were both Republicans.

Lehmberg also heads up the Public Integrity Unit that investigates government corruption. As the Texas Observer noted,  “practically speaking, this anti-corruption unit is one of the few checks on the power and influence Perry has accumulated over 14 years in office.”
Perry, in an effort to shame Lehmberg into quitting (allowing him to then appoint a Republican DA), publicly threatened to use his line-item veto to cut the $7.5 million in funding to the integrity unit that had been approved by the state legislature. She refused. Perry vetoed the funding. The unit had to lay off staff, cut its caseload, and lacked the funds to take on statewide corruption cases.

photo by: Bob Daemmrich

Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg speaks to members of the media following a November 2010 trial

Some have dismissed the charges as nothing more than a partisan witch-hunt. Others, like The New York Times, have in essence defended Perry’s actions as being run-ofthe-mill political “horse trading.”
They are wrong. It’s much more than that. That’s why a Republican judge in Texas appointed a special prosecutor, Michael McCrum, to investigate. And McCrum, whose investigation led to the indictment, is no Democratic operative. He was a federal prosecutor during the George H.W. Bush administration and was even championed by two major Republicans, Senator John Cornyn and then-Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, to serve as U.S. Attorney in Texas.

 

At lectern at right, Tony Buzbee, who leads Mr. Perry’s legal team. He was joined by, from left, David L. Botsford, Bobby Burchfield and Ben Ginsberg. Credit Ralph Barrera/Austin American-Statesman, via Associated Press        

 

So what did Perry do that landed him in hot water? He used the apparatus of the government to strip the resources of an agency charged with ferreting out fraud and government corruption to further his personal agenda of removing Lehmberg from elected office. That’s undisputed. The question is, do Perry’s actions constitute the crimes of abuse of official capacity or coercion of a public servant under Texas law (the coercion being the threat of a veto)?
Keep in mind, Perry could have followed the statutory procedure under Texas law that provides for the removal of DA’s for misconduct. But Perry didn’t avail himself of this. And in fact, after Perry’s veto, a petition was filed by a local lawyer to remove Lehmberg from office under this statute, but in December 2013 a Texas judge ruled against the application, noting that a single instance of intoxication does not rise to the level of “official misconduct.”
Perry could have also continued to call for her to leave to rally public opinion. He didn’t. Instead, he used the powers of his office to essentially strip an elected official of her powers because he had decided it was time for her to go. That’s what this case is truly about, not whether the DA was a drunk or whether Perry had the power to veto funding.
Adding an intriguing wrinkle to this case, as noted by the Texas media, is the question of whether Perry’s motivation in wanting Lehmberg out was her office’s investigation into a $3 billion scandal tied to the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas. Some of the people being investigated apparently have close ties to Perry.

At this point, no one can tell you with certainty if Perry will be convicted on either count of the indictment, the most serious carrying a jail term of 5 to 99 years.  And don’t think that governors never do hard time—in the last 20 or so years, six have gone to jail. But one thing that seems certain is that these charges are not going away soon. As Seema Iyer, a former prosecutor and current criminal defense and civil rights attorney, explained to me, “In over 90 percent of the cases where a defendant has been indicted by a grand jury, the defendant either enters a plea deal or the case is tried.”

NEO-SECESSIONISM IN AMERICAN POLITICS

 A group of rural counties in Colorado will vote in November to secede and work to form their own state.


GARRY WILLS N.Y REVIEW OF BOOKS

The New York Times reported that eleven counties in Colorado are promoting efforts to secede from their state government. Of course, men like Governor Rick Perry of Texas have gone further and threatened secession from the federal government. It is not much noticed that parts of the country act as if they had already seceded from the union. They do not recognize laws and Supreme Court decisions, or constitutional guarantees of free speech. For instance seventeen states have violated the First Amendment by preventing or hindering the work of “navigators”—organizations and businesses funded by the federal government to educate people on ways to follow the rules of the Affordable Care Act. Some groups routinely attempt to block health centers from advising women on the legal right to contraception. Eight state legislatures this year have passed voter restrictions that may violate the Fourteenth Amendment, and similar measures are pending in other states.

The people behind these efforts are imitating what the Confederate States did even before they formally seceded in 1861. Already they ran a parallel government, in which the laws of the national government were blatantly disregarded. They denied the right of abolitionists to voice their arguments, killing or riding out of town over three hundred of them in the years before the Civil War. They confiscated or destroyed abolitionist tracts sent to Southern states by United States mail. In the United States Congress, they instituted “gag rules” that automatically tabled (excluded from discussion) anti-slavery petitions, in flagrant abuse of the First Amendment’s right of petition.
The Southern states were able to live in such open disregard for national law because of two things. First, the states were disproportionately represented in Congress because they got three extra votes for seats in the House of Representatives for every five slaves owned in the state—giving them 98 seats instead of 73 in 1833, and similar margins up to the war. Second, the national Democratic-Republican Party needed the Southern part of its coalition so badly that it colluded with the Southern states’ violations of the Constitution. In 1835, for instance, President Andrew Jackson did not enforce the sacredness of the US mail, allowing states to refuse delivery of anti-slave mailings unless a recipient revealed his identity, requested delivery, and had his name published for vilification.


Rush Limbaugh                 Nigel Parry for The New York Times

 

Just as the Old South compelled the national party to shelter its extremism, today’s Tea Party leaders make Republicans toe their line. Most Republicans do not think laws invalid because the president is a foreign-born Muslim with a socialist agenda. But they do not renounce, or even criticize, their partners who think that. The rare Republican who dares criticize a Rush Limbaugh is quickly made to repent and apologize. John Boehner holds the nation hostage because the Tea Party holds him hostage. The problem with modern Republicans is not fanaticism in the few but cowardice in the many, who let their fellows live in virtual secession from laws they disagree with.

Republican leaders in Congress are too cowardly to say that the voting restrictions being enacted by Republican-controlled state legislatures are racially motivated. They accept the blatant lie that they are aimed only at non-existent “fraud.” They will not crack the open code by which their partners claim to object to Obama because he is a “foreign-born Muslim” when they really mean “a black man.” They will not admit that the many procedural laws adopted to prevent abortion are in violation of the law as defined by the Supreme Court. They go along with the pretence that all the new rules are “for women’s health.” De facto acts of secession are given a pseudo-legal cover.
Thus we get people who say they do not want the government in control of women’s health under Obamacare—just after they order doctors to give women vaginal probes the doctors do not consider medically necessary. Or that they do not want the government telling Americans what they should do about their health—just before they prohibit “navigators” from even discussing choices about their health. The same people who oppose background checks for gun purchases now want background checks for anyone the government authorizes to explain the law to people. This is a gag rule to rank with antebellum bans on the discussion of slavery.

So we have one condition that resembles the pre-Civil War virtual secessionism—the holding of a whole party hostage to its most extreme members. We also have the other antebellum condition—the disproportionate representation of the extreme faction. In state after state in the 2012 election, there was a large vote for President Obama, but a majority of House seats went to Republicans. In Pennsylvania, for instance, Obama won 52 percent of the votes cast, but Republicans got over twice as many seats (13 to 5), thanks to carefully planned gerrymandering of districts by Republican state legislatures. This advantage will be set in stone if all the voter restriction laws now being advanced block voters who might upset the disproportion.
The presiding spirit of this neo-secessionism is a resistance to majority rule. We see this in the Senate, where a Democratic majority is resisted at every turn by automatic recourses to the filibuster. We see it in the attempt to repeal the seventeenth amendment, which allows a majority of voters to choose a state’s senators. The repealers want that choice to go back to the state legislatures, where they rule thanks to anti-majority gerrymandering.


Rick Perry

The Old South went from virtual to actual secession only when the addition of non-slave Western states threatened their disproportionate hold on the Congress and the Court (which had been Southern in makeup when ruling on Dred Scott). It is difficult to conjecture what will happen if the modern virtual seceders do not get their way. Their anti-government rhetoric is reaching new intensity. Some would clearly rather ruin than be ruled by a “foreign-born Muslim....”