WhatFinger

Threatening to veto a bill is apparently now a criminal offense.

The entirely political indictment of Rick Perry

By Dan Calabrese ——--August 18, 2014

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You have probably heard by now that Texas Gov. Rick Perry has been indicted on charges that he abused his executive power, since the news media is all too happy to tell you about it. If you've never heard the expression that a grand jury can indict a ham sandwich, it basically means that indictments don't have to be based on much. You get an overzealous prosecutor, or one with an agenda, and you can get an indictment. It doesn't mean you'll ever get a conviction, and in this case they certainly won't.
But that's really not the objective. Rather, the objective is to hang a negative-sounding storyline around Perry's neck in the event he decides to run for president again. Here's the gist of it: Perry wanted Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg, a Democrat, to resign after she was arrested in an embarrassing drunk driving incident. When she refused, he threatened to veto funding for her office. That's it. But that's enough for Democrats willing to concoct any legal pretext for an entirely political indictment. And when their target is as inviting as Rick Perry, you'd better believe they're willing:
A special prosecutor spent months calling witnesses and presenting evidence that Perry broke the law when he promised publicly to nix $7.5 million over two years for the public integrity unit run by the office of Travis County Democratic District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg. Lehmberg was convicted of drunken driving, but refused Perry’s calls to resign. Perry’s general counsel, Marry Anne Wiley, defended the governor’s action. “The veto in question was made in accordance with the veto authority afforded to every governor under the Texas Constitution,” she said. “We will continue to aggressively defend the governor’s lawful and constitutional action, and believe we will ultimately prevail.” The unit Lehmberg oversees is the same that led the investigation against former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a Texas Republican who in 2010 was convicted of money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering for taking part in a scheme to influence elections in his home state.
By the way, if you want to see why Perry wanted Lehmberg to resign, here you go: Perry is leaving office at the end of this year anyway, and this indictment will likely be laughed out of the courts. Whether he wants to run for president again I have no idea, but my guess would be that something like this won't make him less likely to do it. If anything Perry would run against the type of politically motivated prosecutorial abuse that this represents. Herman talked a few weeks back about the larger trend that this is part of - Democrats trying to sue and investigate their way to power. As this idiotic indictment against Perry shows, they care nothing about the fact that they're abusing the legal process for political purposes. All they know is: They can, so why not. Rick Perry will more than beat this. He'll obliterate it. And the guess here is that he ends up more influential, not less, as a result.

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Dan Calabrese——

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

Follow all of Dan’s work, including his series of Christian spiritual warfare novels, by liking his page on Facebook.

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