“Innocent Before Proven Guilty?”: The Bizarre Bipartisan Rush To Clear Rick Perry
If you’re planning a second presidential bid — especially if your last one didn’t go so well — getting indicted would seem to be, at the very least, a major roadblock.
But the news that Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) is facing felony charges has so far brought the man nothing but support and sympathy. As the Texas Observer’s Forrest Wilder put it, “Judging from the reaction of national pundits and journalists, the verdict in the case of State of Texas vs. James Richard ‘Rick’ Perry is already in: Rick Perry is not just innocent; he’s being railroaded by liberal Democrats in a vindictive, politically motivated prosecution.”
On both the right and the left, politicos have sympathized with the governor, arguing the case is nothing but a political witch hunt. “Sketchy” is how David Axelrod described the whole affair.
Rather than taking a hit, Perry has managed to turn his ordeal into an indictment of the apparently oh-so-powerful liberal establishment in Texas. He’s largely played offense. On Tuesday, he got booked, smiled through his mug shot, then went out for ice cream at Austin-favorite Sandy’s. His statement on the charges explained that “this indictment amounts to nothing more than an abuse of power and I cannot, and will not, allow that to happen.”
The greatest irony with Perry being cast as victim is that the many charges of cronyism and legalized corruption that have long dogged his tenure are now at risk of fading to the background — just part of those ostensibly trumped-up integrity charges.
But the highlights alone show a theme. Perry’s biggest backer, the late home-building magnate Bob Perry (no relation), once got his own commission, the Texas Residential Construction Commission, which largely shielded builders from consumer complaints. In another case, Perry mandated an HPV vaccine for all Texas girls after his former chief of staff, Mike Toomey, became a lobbyist for the vaccine maker, Merck. Then there was the time construction firm HNTB hired former Perry spokesman and friend Ray Sullivan less than a year after he left the governor’s office; from 2004 to 2009, when Sullivan returned to Perry’s staff, the company got $300 million worth of state contracts. (One $45 million contract, for disaster recovery, had to be canceled after the company disastrously mismanaged rebuilding from Hurricane Ike.)
For now, the indictment gives Perry more allies than he has any right to expect, which allows him to gain distance from charges of corruption on every front.
Of course, that might not last.
The charges aren’t nearly as straightforwardly bunk as many reports make them sound. In 2013, Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg was arrested for drunk driving and displayed appalling behavior — screaming and crying and spitting — as she was pulled over and cuffed, all of it caught on camera. Many thought she should resign, but Perry uniquely stood to gain from her departure. Housed within the Travis County DA’s office is the Public Integrity Unit, which investigates and prosecutes corruption in the state. It’s one of the most significant checks on the power Perry has amassed in his 14 years in office. Had Lehmberg resigned, Perry would have appointed her successor.
Perry threatened to veto all funding for the Public Integrity Unit if Lehmberg didn’t resign. And when Lehmberg didn’t step down, the state funding got cut. But Perry, through intermediaries, continued to make offers in exchange for her resignation, including a promise to return funding to the office and another position for Lehmberg within the DA’s office. Though no one disputes that the governor has the power to veto funds or to call for a DA’s resignation, Perry’s guilt or innocence rests on whether these threats and promises amount to an illegal coercion of public officials.
Though some national pundits have claimed a liberal witch hunt because a left-leaning group, Texans for Public Justice, filed the complaint against Perry, it was actually a Republican judge, Bert Richardson, who gave the case to special prosecutor Michael McCrum, a man who’s received support from Democrats and Republicans. We still don’t know what evidence McCrum has gathered in his investigation.
It’s certainly possible that as the case drags out and more information comes to light, Perry will lose his glow of invincibility. Even if the evidence is not enough for a guilty verdict, it may still hang Perry in the courtroom of public opinion. But these aren’t easy cases to prove, and Perry has assembled an impressive team to combat the charges.
For now, Perry should be pretty pleased with turning what should have been a black eye into some sort of beauty mark. He might even go out and get more ice cream to celebrate.
By: Abby Rapoport, Freelance Reporter in Austin, Texas; The Week, August 22, 2014
“The New Credential For 2016”: For Republicans, “Come And Get Me, Coppers”, More Politically Acceptable Than Expressing Contrition
We’ve heard the argument before with respect to Chris Christie and Scott Walker that the abuse-of-power investigations they’ve faced could actually help them as presidential candidates, so long as they stay out of the slammer and can blame their persecution on the godless liberals. But now that Rick Perry has joined the Shadow-of-the-Hoosegow club, RealClearPolitics’ Scott Conroy offers a general theory that they’ll all benefit from a presumption that legal problems mean The Left is afraid of them and wants them hauled off in chains before they can roar through the primaries like avenging angels.
It’s a strategy that may pay dividends in a 2016 primary fight, as all three would be courting conservative voters who will likely see the investigations as badges of honor.
Bob Haus, who helmed Perry’s 2012 campaign in Iowa and is poised to reprise that role in 2016, said the “overwhelming response” from activists in the nation’s first voting state has been strongly supportive.
“They see the actions against Governor Perry for what they are: raw politics,” Haus said. “I would also say that Governor Perry has shown great strength and resolve in this matter. He and his team have managed this issue exceptionally well, and have shown they will fight this aggressively.”
In other words, “come and get me, coppers!” is a more politically effective response than anything expressing contrition or an openness to a slap on the wrist.
Now this has to be deeply frustrating to other candidates seeking 2016 traction who don’t have the credential of being threatened with imprisonment. Consider Bobby Jindal, who’s tried every stunt imaginable to get whipped-up Con-Con activists interested in his presidential availability. As it happens, Bobby was just handed a judicial setback by a state judge who issued an injunction to block Jindal from killing implementation of Common Core education standards in Louisiana–he was the state’s premier Common Core supporter until he became its premier opponent, of course–pending a trial. You have to wonder if Bobby’s brain trust has discussed ways to secure a contempt of court charge to spice things up–you know, the governor entering the courtroom brandishing a Bible and shrieking “Get thee behind me, Satan!” at the judge or something. It honestly wouldn’t surprise me.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, August 21, 2014
“Wounded Innocence?”: Why Rick Perry May Be Out Of Luck
Governor Rick Perry of Texas and President Barack Obama, strangest of bedfellows, are making similar discoveries about the scope of prosecutorial discretion. In short, it’s very broad.
Perry’s education on the subject is an unhappy one. Late Friday, the Texas Governor, who has about five months left in his term, was indicted on two counts: abuse of official capacity and coercion of a public servant. What those charges mean, though, is hard to say. The indictment itself is just two pages and, to put it charitably, unelaborated.
The case has its origins in Perry’s long-running feud with Rosemary Lehmberg, a district attorney in Travis County, which includes Austin and represents an island of blue in the deep-red sea of Texas. Last year, Lehmberg was charged with drunken driving. She promptly pleaded guilty, which, in light of the YouTube videos of her sobriety test and her booking at the police station, was no surprise.
Lehmberg served several days in jail but declined to resign, so Perry decided to make the most of her difficulties. He said that, unless she resigned, he would use his power as Governor to veto $7.5 million in state money for her Public Integrity Unit, which had been hard at work prosecuting Texas pols, many of them Republicans. He could not, he said, support “continued state funding for an office with statewide jurisdiction at a time when the person charged with ultimate responsibility of that unit has lost the public’s confidence.”
What Perry did was obvious. The Governor was using his leverage to jam a political adversary—not exactly novel behavior in Texas, or most other states. But Democrats succeeded in winning the appointment of a special prosecutor, Michael McCrum, to investigate Perry’s behavior, and on Friday McCrum brought the hammer down. The threat to veto the money for the D.A. amounted to, according to the prosecutor, two different kinds of felonies: a “misuse” of government property, and a corrupt attempt to influence a public official in “a specific exercise of his official power or a specific performance of his official duty” or “to violate the public servants known legal duty.” (In the charmingly archaic view of Texas statutes, every public official is a “him.”)
Perry’s indictment has been widely panned, including by many liberals, as an attempt to criminalize hardball politics. (Vetoing things is, generally, part of a governor’s job.) Perry himself is all wounded innocence. “I intend to fight against those who would erode our state’s constitution and laws purely for political purposes, and I intend to win,” he said at a news conference. (It would be easier to feel sorry for Perry if he expressed similar concern about, say, the constitutional rights of those who were executed on his watch and with his support.)
So Perry may have a point, but he also has a problem. Prosecutors have wide, almost unlimited, latitude to decide which cases to bring. The reason is obvious: there is simply no way that the government could prosecute every violation of law it sees. Think about tax evasion, marijuana use, speeding, jay-walking—we’d live in a police state if the government went after every one of these cases. (Indeed, virtually all plea bargaining, which is an ubiquitous practice, amounts to an exercise of prosecutorial discretion.) As a result, courts give prosecutors virtual carte blanche to bring some cases and ignore others. But, once they do bring them, courts respond to the argument that “everyone does it” more or less the same way that your mother did. It’s no excuse. So if Perry’s behavior fits within the technical definition of the two statutes under which he’s charged, which it well might, he’s probably out of luck.
The President is relying on the same concept of discretion to push immigration reform, even though Congress has refused to pass a law to do so. The legislative branch writes the laws, which define the classes of people who are subject to deportation. But it is the executive branch that decides which actual individuals it will pursue and deport. Over the past several years, the Obama Administration has used its discretion to allow more immigrants to stay. During the 2012 campaign, the President announced his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which amounted to a kind of administrative DREAM Act. It limited the number of deportations of people who had been children when they were brought illegally to this country, provided they meet certain other conditions. The legality of DACA has not been successfully challenged.
Prosecutorial discretion is not unlimited. The executive branch can refrain from prosecuting certain individuals, but it cannot, in theory, offer immunity to entire classes of law-breakers. Nor can a prosecutor only charge people of a certain race, or, for that matter, political party. But it’s hard to know who would have standing to challenge a failure to bring a criminal case or a deportation. The rules of standing are usually limited to individuals who have suffered a specific harm, and there’s no harm in not being prosecuted. (The New Republic has a useful primer on the subject. )
That sort of limitation on prosecutorial discretion is unlikely to help Rick Perry. His complaint is that the prosecutor is bringing one case too many, not too few. That claim, almost invariably, is a loser. So, it turns out, may be the soon-to-be-former governor.
By: Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker, August 19, 2014
“Perry Case Complicates Boehner’s Lawsuit”: Republicans Arguing One Thing For Perry, And The Exact Opposite For Obama
The indictment of Governor Rick Perry of Texas and his subsequent court case are about to complicate things politically for John Boehner. No matter the actual outcome of Perry’s case, the arguments made by Perry and his supporters are going to provide an easy equivalence with Boehner’s plans to sue President Obama — an equivalence that would not have existed had Perry not been indicted.
Perry is making the claim that the entire thing is just a partisan witchhunt, driven by out-of-control Democrats in the liberal enclave of Austin. He may succeed in convincing the public of this — and it remains to be seen whether this will help or hurt Perry among Republican primary voters in the upcoming presidential contest. So far, he has signaled that he’s going to wear it as a Republican badge of honor — standing up to liberals trying to tear him down in the courts. Here is Perry’s lawyer, summing up this defense:
The facts of this case conclude that the governor’s veto was lawful, appropriate and well within the authority of the office of the governor. Today’s action, which violates the separation of powers outlined in the Texas Constitution, is nothing more than an effort to weaken the constitutional authority granted to the office of Texas governor, and sets a dangerous precedent by allowing a grand jury to punish the exercise of a lawful and constitutional authority afforded to the Texas governor.
He is arguing that the voters entrusted Perry with executive powers, which Perry then faithfully exercised, and that the case against him is nothing more than Democrats fighting a partisan battle that they already lost at the ballot box.
Now, I should explicitly point out that I have no idea what the actual facts are and until a jury hears the case, it is impossible to know whether the indictment was partisan overreach or not. I’m not going to argue the facts of the case here, to put this another way — we’ll all have plenty of time to do so as the case makes its way through the legal system in the months to come. I’m instead focusing only on the politics of the case.
Perry and his defenders are going to be making the case for strong executive power, which (they will say) is supposed to be executed without the interference of the courts. That’s Perry’s argument in a nutshell, and so far he has not been shy about strongly making this argument himself.
But this is going to become a major political stumbling block for House Republicans when John Boehner actually files his own lawsuit against President Obama. Because they’ll be arguing that, in Texas, the executive should be allowed to execute his powers without interference from the courts; while at the same time arguing that on the national level the courts should indeed interfere with the executive attempting to exercise his powers. The parallels are going to be obvious to all, in fact.
Again, the facts of both cases won’t even really enter into the discussion much, because while one party thinks the Texas case is weak, the other party is going to say the same thing about Boehner’s case. The real argument, in both cases, is: Should this be the way politics works? At what point should political arguments be handled by the justice system? Perry’s case is all about politics from beginning to end. Boehner’s case will be too.
Republicans were counting on Boehner’s case to whip their base voters into a frenzy, right before the midterm elections. They were all set to pronounce the righteousness of their position, using the justice system to rein in an otherwise-unchecked president. That’s going to be a lot tougher sell now, especially since it is scheduled to happen after weeks and weeks of discussing the merits of the case against Perry. Republicans will be denouncing using the justice system against an executive in purely partisan fashion, and then they’ll have to start arguing that John Boehner has every right to use the justice system against an executive in purely partisan fashion. The turnabout will be so dramatic it might induce whiplash.
To the casual observer of politics, the two cases are going to sound an awful lot alike. Some Democrats, perhaps realizing this, have already expressed doubts about the case against Perry. The woman at the heart of the case isn’t exactly a “poster child” character, since video exists of her drunk driving arrest, which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in her personality. To defend the case against Perry means also having to defend her, which is why some Democrats are already backing away from this one.
But Republicans won’t be able to back away so easily from Boehner’s case. This isn’t some squabble in one faraway state; this is national politics. The speaker of the House will be suing the president of the country, which can’t be written off as some sort of parochial affair. House Republicans are already on the record, having voted to proceed with the lawsuit right before the August break. For some Republicans, the lawsuit won’t even go far enough — Boehner is already walking a tightrope with Republicans who want to see him impeach Obama. Boehner won’t be able to back down, to put this another way.
But now the argument for suing Obama is going to get more complicated than anyone could have foreseen. Perry’s case is going to prepare the ground with the public, and provide Democrats with an easy response: “How is this case any different than Perry’s?” Republicans are going to be arguing one thing for Perry, and the exact opposite for Obama. This is going to become more and more obvious to all concerned, in fact.
The best Boehner can hope for, at this point, is that Perry’s case moves very, very slowly. Maybe everyone will forget about it if there is no breaking news from Austin in the next month or so. My guess, however, is that Democrats will be more than ready to remind everyone of the similarities between the two cases, and how Republicans are taking positions in the two which are completely contradictory. The Perry case — again, no matter how it turns out — has certainly made it a lot more politically complicated for Boehner to move forward with his lawsuit.
By: Chris Weigant, The Huffington Post Blog, August 20, 2014
“It’s Getting A Little Silly”: Perry Finds A Way To Blame Obama For Indictments
After Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) was unexpectedly indicted late Friday, the Republican governor discovered some unexpected allies: observers who generally don’t care for Perry blasted the charges against him.
MSNBC’s Ari Melber, for example, characterized the case against the Texas governor as “weak.” Jon Chait called the charges “ridiculous.” Rick Hasen and David Axelrod reached similar conclusions. Scott Lemieux, summarizing the thoughts of many, added, “I’m as contemptuous of Perry as anyone, but this seems really thin.”
Benjy Sarlin joked, “It’s hard to believe an issue would get liberal commentators rallying on Rick Perry’s side, but this indictment seems to be doing it.”
And while the Republican governor and likely presidential candidate is clearly pleased by his reluctant backers, he doesn’t exactly look above the fray when he blames President Obama for an indictment handed down by a Texas grand jury.
The governor, who appeared on “Fox News Sunday,” also used the occasion to criticize President Obama, saying he was responsible for a national erosion of the “rule of law.” […]
Mr. Perry repeatedly invoked the “rule of law,” suggesting that it had suffered under Mr. Obama, whether in the scandal over the Internal Revenue Service, enforcement of border security or surveillance by the National Security Agency.
Look, if the governor wants to mount a proper defense against the pending felony counts, fine. Apparently, he’ll even enjoy a fair amount of support from the left.
But if Perry wants to position himself as a responsible chief executive, who’s been targeted for petty and partisan reasons, his baseless complaining about the president won’t help his broader public-relations cause.
For one thing, there is no IRS scandal; border security has never been stronger; and it’s Perry’s party that supports expansive NSA surveillance. If this is the best the governor can do to offer proof of Obama eroding the “rule of law,” he’s going to need a new talking point.
For another, let’s not forget that the Obama administration has literally nothing to do with Perry’s indictment. The Texas grand jury was empaneled by Texas prosecutors scrutinizing Texas law.
But taking a step back, it’s hard not to notice the pattern: when Republicans find themselves in a difficult position, they reflexively try to blame the president whether it makes sense or not. Eric Cantor lost a primary? Blame President Obama. John Boehner failed to pass immigration bills? Blame President Obama. Bob McDonnell was indicted on corruption charges? Blame President Obama. Sam Brownback fared much worse than expected in a GOP primary? Blame President Obama. Chris Christie’s plan screwed up New Jersey’s finances? Blame President Obama.
It’s getting a little silly.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, August 18, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 