Wait - what? Why would a criminal violation be off limits as a political pressure point?
Speaking as a non-Texan with no local Texas knowledge and no particular fondness for Texas politicians or Rick Perry, this particular veto appears to be the most successful political act of Perry’s career. He’s in the national headlines with pundits and legal scholars unanimously in his corner. The New York Times editorialized in his favor! Vegas would have given that longer odds than “Dan Quayle, 5-time Jeopardy Champ.” I can’t imagine an event that would give Perry better press than he’s gotten.
Is anyone aware of any lawyer who has written in defense of the legal merits here? I’m curious to see what arguments someone can bring to the fore that address the Hanson case.
He completely misunderstands how First Amendment overbreadth challenges work. He also claims important differences between Hanson and the current case, but then doesn’t actually lay any out. For example, he says that Perry had a legal team to guide him. Hanson was a judge and had a legal staff to boot – how is that a difference?
There was public harm in the Hanson case too. Hanson was also a public servant. Hanson also had to avoid misconduct.
Finally, he calls out Ferguson, a prior case of a governor being accused under very similar circumstances. He says:
He was never criminally convicted. The “conviction” refers to the Texas Senate’s action following impeachment. That’s not a criminal conviction. The Ferguson case does not create any sort of criminal precedent.
Thanks for finding this, but it’s not a serious look at the legal issues.
This application of the law is mind-boggling. Clearly, the law is meant to apply to a person threatening to burn down a legislator’s house unless he votes “no” on the upcoming bill.
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First off, read broadly, the last paragraph of the law empowers the “member of the governing body ” to engage in wholly legal but still abusive coercion without any restraint. That can’t be right, can it?
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This is exactly why this law doesn’t do what he thinks it does. The statute is an attempt to outlaw coercion of public officials. It does not, therefore, legalize everything else. It does not “empower” any member of a body “to engage in wholly legal but still abusive coercion.” It means that this statute simply doesn’t apply.
Other aspects of criminal law and employer/employee relations apply, but this statute doesn’t.
The more I look at this last issue, the more I’ll say that the charitable assumption is that Robert Murphy is not a lawyer. To hold up the Ferguson case as prior precedent, on par with the Hanson precedent, is an understandable mistake for a layperson. A lawyer would understand that the claim is deceptive.
Ferguson was indicted, yes, but never tried criminally. He was impeached and then the Texas Senate convicted him. He tried to avoid the impeachment by resigning, but the Senate continued the impeachment trial and conviction, imposing on him the penalty that he was stripped of office (moot, since he already resigned) and disqualification to hold any public office in Texas, which is presumably why they pushed ahead to finish the impeachment process with conviction.
And they were right to worry about the issue. Ferguson tried to get the courts to declare that the impeachment wasn’t valid. That failed. His wife then ran for governor and won, becoming the first female governor in Texas history, and moved a desk for him into the governor’s office, where he presumably wielded some influence over the exercise of the governor’s office anyway.
Anyway, history lesson aside, the bottom line is this: an impeachment “trial” is not a criminal trial. It’s conducted by the Texas Senate, not a judge, and there is no neutral jury; the Texas Senate serves as the jury. Their process, procedure, and results are not appealable or reviewable for error.
So when Murphy writes, “[Ferguson] was impeached, resigned, and convicted. (Sounds pretty similar, doesn’t it?)” he implies that the conviction is what Perry faces now, a criminal conviction. But Perry isn’t facing impeachment. He’s facing a criminal conviction in court, not a conviction in the Senate following impeachment.
That’s an understandable mistake for a non-lawyer to make.
If Murphy is a lawyer, though, it’s a deliberate attempt to confuse the audience by equivocation on the word “conviction.”
Perry wants Lehmberg gone and made no bones about it.
Perry vetoed the bill funding her department.
The trick for the prosecution will be proving that #1 led directly to #2, and isn’t just coincidence, since the governor doesn’t have to justify vetoes for any reason.
While I don’t at all doubt that Emperor Perry vetoed the bill for the exact reasons that people claim, I think it’s probably unlikely that the prosecution will be able to draw that correspondence between #1 and #2 without some kind of smoking gun correspondence threatening exactly that sort of retaliation, and I don’t think Perry’s nearly that dumb.
Otherwise, it’s an everyday gubernatorial veto, and some woman with a DUI and a nasty drunk-tank video claiming that the Governor retaliated against her, and the Governor sitting there saying “What? I just vetoed that funding. Didn’t have anything to do with her.”
I don’t think that’s right. I think that Perry not only admits, but proclaims from the rooftop, that #1 is true, #2 is true, and that #1 led directly to #2.
The question is whether those facts are criminal. And Bricker’s quest is to find a single lawyer that says that is is.
Speaking of which, here is a Cornell law professor who says that there is a potential crime, followed by a UCLA law professor who says that there is not.
It is alleged that Perry offered to reinstate funding if Lehmberg agreed to resign. If this can be corroborated, it makes it hard to argue Perry had any other reason for exercising his veto.
Unless I’m reading this incorrectly (and I’m open to correction) a strict reading of subsection (c) would make it legal for the governor to coerce a public servant to do all kinds of “legal” things. It’s not illegal for a governor to ask a DA for money, right? Let’s even soften it a bit and call it an interest-free loan. And it’s not illegal for a governor to exercise line-item veto. But I find it implausible that Texas law bestows governors the right to take financial favors in exchange for certain votes.
Why would the resignation of an elected official be any different than a bribe? If it boils to what is in whose self-interest, it doesn’t take a mastermind to see how Lehmberg’s resignation would benefit Perry, and I expect that this is the angle the prosecution will be going for.
Well, Dorf is clearly a lawyer. but as RNATB indicates, he clearly says he hasn’t researched Texas law – he makes no mention of Hanson, for example. I think he’s making a general policy argument, not a legal one, again as RNATB suggests.
So I guess I’d like to move the initial goalpost a bit; I want to find a lawyer who’s making a legal argument.
Come on … Even if it IS against the letter of the law, prosecutors have discretion of which cases to prosecute and which not to. Clearly the law in question was meant to stop quid pro quo and retaliatory type politics. Doubtful the people who passed this law in Texas would’ve objected to coercing a public official guilty of clear misconduct into resigning if they didn’t have the dignity and sense to resign on their own.
