WhatFinger


And quite a few other lefties too.

Boy, that case against Rick Perry is pretty weak, says . . . MSNBC?



It has become pretty common in Texas for Austin-based Democrat prosecutors to abuse the justice system as a way of attacking prominent Republican politicians. District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg infamously (and unsuccessfully) tried it against Kay Bailey Hutchinson and Tom DeLay. But you know the tactic is out of hand when even prominent liberal journalists and legal figures are condemning it as bogus and baldly political.
We start with Ari Melber at MSNBC of all places, explaining just what an implausible stretch it is to try to turn a governor's use of his constitutional veto power into a criminal matter:
Even if the logic of that analogy helps prosecutors, however, the facts still help Perry. Imagine a brazen, Blagojevich-style veto threat here -- it would be something like demanding an illegal, personal bribe for the veto. That's miles away from Perry, who was vetoing funds over a staffing dispute. Then there is the felony charge based on the veto itself. Prosecutors often pile up several charges based on related events and conduct, but the charge for the veto is especially odd and tendentious. First, it charges that Perry's June 14 veto amounted to a misuse of government property -- of money "approved and authorized by the Legislature" to fund the prosecutors' office. But that money was not legally available to the office unless the governor approved it. On its face, the indictment suggests that simply disagreeing with the legislature's funding choice was itself a "misuse" of funds -- a crime. That is absurd. The premise also gets Texas law backwards -- it's a line-item veto state -- and seems to criminalize policy differences.

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More broadly, corruption laws are not typically applied this way. Bans on misusing government property are usually for combating graft -- embezzlement, bribes, secretly misdirecting funds -- not for policing routine budgeting. One can imagine hypothetical vetoes that would be prohibited under law, like a governor rejecting funding only for female dorms at a state university because he wanted to discourage women from campus. (Courts could overrule the move as an equal protection violation, though it still wouldn't involve criminal charges.) Again, Perry was nowhere near that kind of violation. His veto statement from last year was pretty clear: "Despite the otherwise good work the Public Integrity Unit's employees, I cannot in good conscience support continued State funding for an office ... at a time when the person charged with ultimate responsibility of that unit has lost the public's confidence. This unit is in no other way held accountable to state taxpayers, except through the State budgetary process."
The fact that the left-wing media are running from this suggests that a major tactic of the Democratic Party against potential Republican presidential contenders is in trouble. This is the same nonsense they've tried against Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal and others, and it seems they especially like it as a weapon against Republican governors. If you are perceived as a potential presidential candidate, and a Democrat prosecutor can be found who is willing to trump up some sort of charge against you, then you can pretty much expect you're going to be face some sort of charge or indictment, no matter how flimsy. The point is not to get a conviction. It's to give the New York Times and other left-wing media the opportunity to constantly refer to the "scandal" whenever they mention you, thus tainting you with an air of corruption and making it impossible for your expected presidential bid to gain traction. The Times (as you might expect) is certainly playing ball on the Perry matter. But an awful lot of other left-leaning types are recognizing that they will only jeopardize their own credibility if they pretend this is legitimate. At Salon, they're warning Democrats this is going to backfire if they don't drop it. Liberal legal legend Alan Dershowitz calls the prosecution of Perry "un-American". The Washington Post editorial page, where they are hardly Rick Perry fans, can't even begin to countenance this nonsense. Dude, even David Axelrod calls the whole thing "pretty sketchy". It's entirely possible that, over time and if Perry runs for president, political media types will still play the game of making off-handed mentions of the indictment - hoping everyone will forget what a sham the indictment was. Their justification would be that while the charges were a load of crap, the indictment still matters to the political narrative and that's why they can't just ignore it. Where I think this could backfire is that Perry is not the type to lie down and take that sort of garbage, and he could very well turn it around on Democrats and use it to put a spotlight on the way they abuse virtually every aspect of political power - including authority in the criminal justice system - to pursue their own political goals. And let's not forget how all this started. Rosemary Lehmberg is a Texas district attorney who was belligerent and obnoxious while being booked on a DUI charge for which she eventually did jail time, and all this was caught on video. Perry objected to the idea that someone like Lehmberg should remain in a position of enforcing the law, and he was willing to use his veto power to back up his position. Do Democrats really want to side with Rosemary Lehmberg in this matter? Because by trying to manufacture these bogus charges against Rick Perry, that's exactly what they're doing. They deserve to have her drunken escapades hung around their necks, and I have a feeling Perry is just the guy to do it.


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

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