Gov. Goodhair Perry Indicted, Felony Abuse of Power Charged

[Simon_Jester]

My concern with (b) is that normal political processes are for when a politician does something that is simply bad. Like, say, murdering someone.

Here, Perry's wrong action wasn't simply a bad action. It was an action that attacked the structure of government itself, an attempt to blow up one of the checks and balances that lawfully should be constraining his behavior.

That's the sort of thing you really, really need abuse-of-power laws to cope with.

What? Murdering someone is obviously not something that should be handled by normal political processes.

Sorry, I was horribly unclear; I consider "normal political processes" to include impeachment proceedings to formally strip the politician of the powers of his office.

Put another way: we do not need a special law against committing murder while in political office. Making it illegal for everyone, and having a provision for impeaching politicians who commit heinous crimes, is good enough.

We do need special laws to prevent powerful figures in the government from using their powers cleverly to destroy the checks and balances on their authority. It is not enough to simply disapprove of that

And again, there's a gulf between immoral and unethical, and criminal. We have a politician who use his power to coerce another politician into commiting an act. To make what Perry did illegal would require that you be able to pin down in law why this coercion is illegal, and other types of coercing (even involving the same power) would not be.

Lets play counterfactual: the Governor has done something a legislator considers wrong, and a legislator tells the governor to resign, or he'll submit a bill of impeachment. The legislator is threatening to use his power to get a public official who doesn't work for him out of office. The governor obviously does not work for the legislator.

I think my main reasoning is that the veto and the impeachment power are both specifically and normally intended to be 'pointed' at the legislature and the executive head, respectively.

Whereas the decision to veto funding for an organization is not specifically intended to be pointed at specific figures in a government not part of your chain of command.

However, this requires some way to talk about 'intent' which is an issue. I hope it clears up where I'm coming from though.

You object "The legislator isn't trying to blow up one of the checks and balances! He's using them!". Arguably, so is Gov Perry. The power of the purse is one of the tools of the Governor of Texas. And he's using it on a state offiicial. Lehmberg may be elected by Travis County, but because she's in charge of a state office, she's a state official.

If she's Perry's to fire, he should have other means than using a tool designed for impersonal policy decisions against a specific individual.

[Ralin]

I think my main reasoning is that the veto and the impeachment power are both specifically and normally intended to be 'pointed' at the legislature and the executive head, respectively.

Whereas the decision to veto funding for an organization is not specifically intended to be pointed at specific figures in a government not part of your chain of command.

However, this requires some way to talk about 'intent' which is an issue. I hope it clears up where I'm coming from though.

So how is that different from actively refusing to pass any budget or law that Obama likes or supports in any way? Because near as I can tell Republican policy as a whole for the past six years has been to make sure nothing can actually be accomplished through Congress as long as he's president.

[Maraxus]

What? Murdering someone is obviously not something that should be handled by normal political processes.
Perry's use of a veto is not something that's obviously bad, seeing as we have a number of people supporting his use of it. Beyond that, the PIU failed to indict any of the CPRIT board members (the only members of CPRIT appointed by Perry). Moreover, none of them were even being investigated at the time of the veto threat and resignation demand.

October 2012: Concerns about CPRIT’s practices come to light in a report in the Dallas Morning News. Within a month of the Morning News story, members of the Texas Legislature call for reforms of the state cancer agency.
December 2012: The Public Integrity Unit officially begins its CPRIT investigation.
January 2013: Lehmberg tells the American-Statesman that the 11 members of the CPRIT board – all of whom were appointed by Perry – “are not under suspicion in the investigation.” That means the investigation is focusing only on CPRIT staff members, none of whom were appointed or hired by Perry.
April 2013: The Texas Senate passes a bill reforming CPRIT and putting more funding into the agency. Lehmberg is arrested for drunken driving.
June 2013: Following a Statesman report that he was weighing a veto if Lehmberg didn’t resign, Perry vetoes state funding for the Public Integrity Unit. Despite the veto, the unit continues to operate.
January 2014: CPRIT commercialization chief Jerry Cobbs is indicted. Cobbs’ indictment alleges that he misled former CPRIT executives by failing to disclose that the Peloton Therapeutics grant application hadn’t been reviewed as required by law. Lehmberg says no other indictments are expected.
May 2014: Gregg Cox, who heads the Public Integrity Unit, confirms to the American-Statesman that the CPRIT inquiry continued following Perry’s veto. “The loss of the state funding slowed us down somewhat, but we were able to complete a thorough investigation, ” Cox said.

I'm not so sure about lots of people thinking it's ok. So far I've seen mainly folks, including yourself, saying that Perry has functionally no constitutional limits on his veto power. That may be so, but it's kind of untested as far as Texas jurisprudence is concerned.

And if I gave the impression that Perry's using Lehmberg's DWI to kill an investigation into one of his favorite statewide organizations, I was being a bit unclear. I don't mean that Perry's actions are directly related to the CPRIT inquiry. I was trying to point out that: A. it was a bit unseemly and made me more outraged, FWIW, and B. that the state GOP has hated the PIU for quite some time, largely because it's fulfilling its purpose. The whole DWI angle in this controversy is such an obvious red herring that I'm surprised that anyone other than hack media pundits buy it.

And again, there's a gulf between immoral and unethical, and criminal. We have a politician who use his power to coerce another politician into commiting an act. To make what Perry did illegal would require that you be able to pin down in law why this coercion is illegal, and other types of coercing (even involving the same power) would not be.

Lets play counterfactual: the Governor has done something a legislator considers wrong, and a legislator tells the governor to resign, or he'll submit a bill of impeachment. The legislator is threatening to use his power to get a public official who doesn't work for him out of office. The governor obviously does not work for the legislator.

You object "The legislator isn't trying to blow up one of the checks and balances! He's using them!". Arguably, so is Gov Perry. The power of the purse is one of the tools of the Governor of Texas. And he's using it on a state offiicial. Lehmberg may be elected by Travis County, but because she's in charge of a state office, she's a state official.

That's the prosecution's whole case, which we don't have access to yet and we don't know what kind of evidence they're planning on introducing, nor their main contentions, nor anything else beyond a vague (and admittedly shoddy-looking) indictment. Given how I feel on a moral level re: Perry's veto, I'm willing to give them a shot at making their case.

That counter-factual doesn't really hold up because you're ignoring key differences between a veto and bill of impeachment. Most obviously, a veto is unappealable except with an over-ride and is cast at Perry's discretion. Bills of impeachment require at the very least 2/3rds majorities in the House and Senate, along with a very long trial where people can parse the differences in the case. Not to mention that it has a very low likelihood of succeeding, whereas a veto rarely gets overriden. You can't compare the two just because they're both constitutionally delegated powers to be mean to people. By the by, Clinton's impeachment was the first scenario that came up after reading that paragraph. Something that I also consider a horribly immoral and deeply disturbing abuse of power by one branch of government.

And Lehmberg's not a state official. She doesn't work for a state agency. She heads a prosecutor's office that has a section that receives state funding. She's not a state official any more than any other DA, or anyone in a non-profit that receives state funding. It'd be just as inappropriate for Perry to pressure any of those people into resigning with his threat of a veto.

She's in a state office (as mentioned above). How does a resident of Houston get relief from a hypothetical corrupt Travis County DA?

She's not in a state office (as mentioned above). A resident of Harris County would be in no position to get legal relief from a corrupt Travis County DA because Travis County does not, and never has had, authority over Harris. It's an odd question, really. Why would a Houston resident have a grievance against the Travis County DA's office when Travis doesn't have jurisdiction over them? If it's some sort of personal dispute, the Harris County resident could always resort to civil proceedings, either against the DA or the County.

One of the big-picture items here is whether or not Perry has functionally unlimited veto powers or whether there are unwritten constitutional restraints on him. I think the courts should explore this more fully, since this sort of thing is the exact kind of situation that ethics and abuse of power laws are meant to restrain.

[Beowulf]

The Constitution of Texas gives the Governor a limited form of the power of the purse. It's a blunter form than the legislature gets in that it can only be used to zero out funding entirely, and not just reduce it. The power of the purse is designed to be used as a check. Arguably, yes the governor should have a less blunt tool, but that would have required the government to have been designed, rather than evolved. Because it did evolve, there's little warts like this where the legislators didn't think about failure modes.

[Simon_Jester]

So how is that different from actively refusing to pass any budget or law that Obama likes or supports in any way? Because near as I can tell Republican policy as a whole for the past six years has been to make sure nothing can actually be accomplished through Congress as long as he's president.

I don't think that represents an abuse of power on their part per se, though, because it springs from a policy decision. They can reasonably assert that their real position is "we won't pass any bill we can't accept, and we can't accept any dilution or compromise from position XYZ."

That's inflexible and stupid, but they aren't trying to use the power of their office to accomplish anything Congress shouldn't be able to do- they're just futilely trying to do an impossible thing by expecting a Democratic president to pass Republican bills rubberstamp-style. They're not trying to purge the executive branch of sitting Democrats, or torpedo any government agencies they don't already think should be shut down for reasons of policy.

Even the government shutdown reflects, in my opinion, a policy that is merely inflexible and stupid (not criminal), as opposed to an abuse of power (which would be criminal).

The Constitution of Texas gives the Governor a limited form of the power of the purse. It's a blunter form than the legislature gets in that it can only be used to zero out funding entirely, and not just reduce it. The power of the purse is designed to be used as a check. Arguably, yes the governor should have a less blunt tool, but that would have required the government to have been designed, rather than evolved. Because it did evolve, there's little warts like this where the legislators didn't think about failure modes.

In this case, purse-power is a check on the legislature, to be used if the legislature funds something the governor thinks is too wrong to tolerate. It is not to be used just because the governor got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning and is feeling cranky.

And "I want that drunk out of an office, but it's an office I don't actually have jurisdictional control over, so I can't just fire her" is a lot closer to "wrong side of the bed" than it is to seriously asserting that the PIU is somehow 'too wrong to tolerate.'