The De Lay Debacle

Great Debates
21

I feel compelled to clear up a few points here.

First, the “Killer D’s,” as they are being called here in the Friendship State, did not violate any state laws by fleeing a quorum call. The Speaker of the House has the authority to call upon the Sergeant of Arms of the House to call upon the state police to round up missing legislators if a quorum is not met, but the legislators are simply to be escorted to the Capitol, not arrested. The quorum rule (which is not unique to Texas by any means) is meant to ensure two things: (1) that a rump session does not start meeting in secret and passing all kinds of crazy laws without a full representative vote, and (2) that a general feeling of congeniality is maintained among all lawmakers. If the majority party pisses off the minority party to the extent that they cannot even maintain a quorum, then there is something broken about the way the majority party is conducting its business. In this regard, the quorum rule serves the same basic function as the Senate fillibuster rule.

Second, this has just been a horrific session of the Texas legislature. Those of you who are claiming that the D’s have thwarted the democratic process haven’t been paying attention to the way the current Congress is behaving. While Texas has been in Democratic hands for the past 130 years or so, national party political designations have rarely gotten in the way of getting business done. A handshake and good relationships with fellow legislators has traditionally been much more important than whether your seat is on the right or left side of the aisle. Former Speaker Pete Laney (owner of the supposedly missing plane) was known for his unimpeachable fairness and bipartisanship. The new Craddick House, by contrast, has used heavy-handed tactics to prevent Democratic bills and amendments from even getting to debate or floor votes. The democratic process was broken long before the D’s skipped town. Some state employees have had health insurance benifits cut by 65%. Major state universities have lost funding to the tune of 8 figures each. Tuition rates are being raised by about 20% across the board. Not satisfied with the badly damaged education system, the Republicans are getting ready to strike the entire public school system a killing blow (one legislator equated the idea of free public education to Communism, apparantly without batting her heavily mascaraed eyes). Tens of thousands of poor children are being booted from the CHIP program, which offers healthcare and immunization benefits. The Governor had disabled Texans arrested for protesting health care cuts, including the closing of one hospital for the disabled. And those disabled people will be prosecuted under the auspices of our new Atty Gen Greg Abbot, himself disabled and a beneficiary of soon-to-be-illegal tort lawsuits. Abbot, you see, had the good fortune to be wealthy at the time of his injuries. God help the underprivileged should they be struck by the same blow of fortune. All of this with practically no Democratic input whatsoever. Even when one party has majority control, it is a serious breach of the principals of representative government to completely shut out the minority party from the deliberation process. This was a train that needed to be derailed.

Third, the D’s actions were not strictly necessary to prevent the redistricting from getting to the Governor’s desk. The Senate operates under separate rules, and the Dems there have a couple more votes than they need to freeze the map before it even gets to conference.

Fourth, redistricting is unnecessary anyway. Nominally, the Republicans have a 3-district heads-up under the current map. The problem is that some Republican strongholds, such as the Abilene area (largely rural and red, red, red, and home to three bible-based colleges) keep voting for Democratic representatives such as Charlie Stenholm. Why should the Republicans get a new map if they can’t even field electable candidates in Republican-heavy districts? If every nominally Republican district voted for a Republican representative, the Texas delegation to Washington would have an 18-14 majority, which is in line with recent voter trends. This is a case of the Repubs trying to abuse the map to get what the voters don’t seem inclined to do on their own – vote for their own party members.

I’m no fan of obstructionist political moves, but I can’t fault the D’s for pulling this stunt when the Repubs got the ball rolling by using their own brand of obstructionism within the Austin chambers. It’s all a horrible, divisive mess; I guess we just got too used to the laid-back bipartisanship that has existed here for most of my lifetime. As it is, we have a dictatorship of the majority party, which is willing to use police powers to coerce dissenters to fall in line. That is too reminiscent of Stalinism for my tastes. Hopefully everyone will come back to their senses for the next election cycle.

22

I didn’t say that and didn’t mean to imply it. My curiosity at this point is about the effectiveness of the tactic, not it’s rightness or wrongness. As I said earlier, politicaly motivated redistricting is so embedded in the SOP of state legislatures that the action of skipping town appears to me to be adolescent. The Dems are reacting to a diminution of their power, and it would be ironic if that action turned out to exacerbate the problem.

23

BTW what’s a guy from Nipples, Minnnesota doing messing with Tejas Politix???

24

Recovering Texan. Born and raised in Waco. Quiet little town. You never heard of it, nothing ever happens there.

25

The Democrats aren’t the ones who set this precedent, Brutus: http://www2.ocregister.com/ocrweb/ocr/article.do?id=39706

This is no different from a filibuster, and just as permissible under the democratic process.

26

Odd that you would cite a 1994 move by California Republicans as the origin of this tactic, when virtually every article on the Ardmore 53 has referenced the “Killer Bees,” the twelve Democrats in the 1979 Texas Senate who used the same tactic of bolting the legislative session to prevent a quorum.

27

I have never knowingly posted a lie. Period.

28

The American tradition of trying to confound quorums didn’t start in Tejas or California. In 1784 the radical party in Pennsylvania successully halted the attempt by their conservative opponents to repeal the Test Act by abandoning the Assembly before the end of the session. They were not punished by their constituents for their deed instead winning control of the Assembly in the elections held the next month.

However when they tried the same trick again three years later to halt or at least slow down the calling of a convention to ratify the newly written Constitution they found themselves in a different situation altogether. A “Federalist” mob sought out a couple of Assemblymen and carried them kicking and screaming to Independence Hall and held them in their seats by force while the vote was held. The “Quorum Riot” of September 29, 1787 quite possibly saved the Constitution from oblivion.

Given the political climate of the state had the radicals been given more time to hand pick their candidates and energize their base in the hinterlands they might have blocked the call for a convention when the legislature reformed the following year. It’s hard to imagine that the ratification convention in New York which was dominated by “Antifederalists” would have voted to go along with the plan if all of the other major states hadn’t already ratified.

29

Problem being, there was no plane. It was a bus. It didn’t crash. The report by that stalwart state trooper, Lt. Will Crais, that tried to divert DHS into a redistricting squabble was fabricated.

But the OP’s concern is probably misplaced - the political damage DeLay & Co. had hoped to avoid has occurred anyway.

30

At the moment it seems very much like the infamous McDonalds “coffee” lawsuit. People who know only the bare surface facts think it is an absolute outrage and are dropping support from the D’s. Once someone starts digging and gets more facts on what was actually going on, they begin to learn that it wasn’t as unjustified and outrageous as the sound bytes make it out to be and give the D’s either the benefit of the doubt or support their choice. I’ve talked with a fair number of my fellow Texans about the issue and the more they learn the facts surrounding the decision the more they start to say things like “Well, ok, if that is what it was like then I can understand why they did it.”

I guess it will become a propaganda war around the time of the next elections. The D’s will be desperately trying to tell their side of the story and the R’s will be trying to fan the flames with allegations of cowardice and dereliction of duty. In any event it’s going to get a lot uglier before it gets better.

Enjoy,
Steven

31

Not sure you’re reading that right. I think that they thought there was a plane when they made the call, but that there (apparently) was not.

But then, who knows? The homeland security quotes the officer as saying the alleged plane was going from Oklahoma to Texas rather than the other way. The Dems are accusing the Repubs of “abusing” federal power when they know full well that the feds are the only ones who collect information on aviation matters, whether intrastate or inter. No one could find out that the plane did (or did not) fly, even though this information is easily available in federal and commercial databases. There’s a guy named Clark Kent who looks mild-mannered but who does not wear glasses. There’s a Texas legislator with a Piper Cheyenne when everyone knows a Texan wouldn’t be seen dead in anything smaller than a Beech King Air.

32

Linkie-poo for the doubters.

Either the Speaker, who already was using Department of Public Safety resources for power politics, is now letting them twist in the wind to cover his own ass, or Lt. Crais made it up.

“Who knows?”, manhattan asks. “Anyone who actually wants to find out, and not with any real difficulty, in the spirit if Fighting Ignorance”, is the obvious reply. C’mon, dude.

33

Begging your pardon, but I don’t see anywhere in your quoted text, or in the linked article, where Lt. Crais or any other DPS official says that Craddick instructed them to bring in the feds in any capacity, much less file the report about the airplane. Nothing that Crais or the DPS has said contradicts what Craddick’s office claims: that the DPS was instructed to find the missing lawmakers, but was not instructed on the specifics of how to accomplish that goal.

The closest thing you’ve got is that the operation was run from a Texas lege conference room – hardly surprising, given the nature of the goal. BFD.

And, FTR, Texas law allows for the DPS to bring in lawmakers to ensure a quorum. “Power politics”? Maybe. But I’d like to hear a scenario utilizing that provision of Texas law that doesn’t involve power politics. The people of Texas (along with many other states) have for a very long time recognized that ensuring a quorum is a valid use of DPS resources. Why do you disagree?

34

Quoting blogs…dubious accounts by state troopers…

It’s elucidator channeling december via the American Spectator.
Very strange.

35

But first you have to give a shit, don’t you?

Please identify which of the following is in contention:

  1. The Speaker of the Texas House was within his legal rights to have the Texas State Police try to find the absconding legislators and escort them back to the State House.

  2. The Texas Department of Public Safety at some point came to believe that some of the legislators were at some point aboard a private aircraft.

  3. It was within the legitimate scope of DPS’ duties to try to find the aircraft.

  4. Lacking any resources whatsoever on tracking aircraft, the correct thing for a state official to do when looking for one is to call the feds.

  5. The feds offered no assistance, and if they had it would simply have been to relay information which is publicly available.

What am I missing here? This is a scandle? C’mon, certainly a big state like Texas can do better than that.

36

I’m just waiting for Tom DeLay to tell me how lumping downtown Austin with the Mexico border (300 miles away) and calling that a “district” makes sense.

37

Thats what the situation really calls for rjung. Examples of the effect of this effort in creative politics. I had heard mention of some pretty absurd excercises in flexible geography and fluid demography, but don’t have any cites to offer. It would further the argument greatly, or at least mine, were there such. Got any?

If what I’ve heard is true, (and if Molly Ivins is a liar december is a duck) the blatancy of this particular perversion performed on the body politic exceeds all previous bounds. Even for Texas.

In that case, I contend that the Democrats action in preventing such was civic and noble. This sort of shit must be resisted.

And I gotta ask: how much force is contained in or justified by “escort” as in “Chuck Norris shall excort yer honorable ass back to Austin by whatever means he deems appropriate”.

So: to sum up, anybody got any solid examples of proposed chicanery. (And yes, I’m assuming the Texas Republicans are up to no good, but mostly because they’re Texans. But I’m not assuming there are any virgins in this orgy.)

38

Oh for Pete’s sake. The officers can use nondeadly force only to the extent it is reasonably necessary to secure the person taken into custody. Since none of the Dem lawmakers were likely to put up any kind of physical resistance to the DPS, the DPS could not, and presumably would not, use any force whatsoever.

I suppose it’s theoretically possible that some nutbar lawmaker might try to punch a DPS officer, and then the DPS office would have to physically restrain him. But in that instance it ain’t the DPS officer’s fault that force is necessary, is it?

39

And if he insists on walking away? A person under arrest cannot walk away. Can a person under “escort” walk away?

40

Then the officer may use such force as is reasonably necessary to stop him from walking away, just like any other person detained in the course of the officer’s duties. What’s your point?