Morning-after fallout from the Perry indictment

-- CultureMap Houston:

If found guilty, Perry could be face up to 109 years in prison. He'll surrender to the Travis County Jail where he will be fingerprinted and have a mugshot taken. According to the Associated Press, his defense attorney David L. Botsford is being paid $450 per hour with state funds.

-- Socratic Gadfly:

...(I)f convicted, Tricky Ricky will have to give up that beloved hogleg that he allegedly uses for killing coyotes. It's not just the concealed weapons angle; convicted felons in Texas can't own firearms for five years, and they can't ever have concealed carry permits. That, and many other, restrictions he would face are here. (It's also a great way to do voter suppression, because a felonious Trickster can't vote until he's done with sentence and parole!)

No pistole and no voting; that's about the most fun parts of this.

Beyond that, this has been coming for 20-plus years.

At my first newspaper, I had a set of investigative journalism stories connected to his race against Jim Hightower for Ag Commissioner. Hightower's department was investigating an agrichemical company legally incorporated as a co-op. One of his agents accidentally went from adjoining private ranchland onto the company's site. Perry reportedly told the company to use this as an excuse to stall, stall, stall until after the election, which he, of course won in 1990.  Given the bribery cases against Hightower's aides (to which he was in no way personally connected), Perry had a good chance of winning.

Assuming what I heard as rumor is true, nobody should underestimate Tricky Ricky's legal elbows.

-- Real-time reactions from the Texas Politics blog at the HouChron, "need-to-knows" from Talking Points Memo and the Texas Observer, and some gloating and more good links from Greg Mitchell and Juanita Jean.

I'm going to hold off on the chortling at least until I see a mugshot that's been Photoshopped.

Update: This Austin Chronicle piece has a good backgrounder on Michael McCrum, the special prosecutor who brought the case to the grand jury that returned the indictments.  Kindly note that he was appointed by a Republican judge.

Rick Perry catches two-count felony indictment

A grand jury indicted Gov. Rick Perry on two counts Friday, accusing him of abusing his veto power by threatening to withhold funding from the Travis County's public corruption unit if the district attorney did not resign following her drunken driving arrest.

The Travis County grand jury, led by special prosecutor Mike McCrum, indicted Perry on one count of abuse of official capacity, a first-degree felony, and coercion of a public servant, a third-degree felony.

There's legal precedent.

The indictment is the first of its kind since 1917, when James "Pa" Ferguson was indicted on charges stemming from his veto of state funding to the University of Texas in an effort to unseat faculty and staff members he objected to. Ferguson was eventually impeached, then resigned before being convicted, allowing his wife, Miriam "Ma" Ferguson, to take over the governorship.

Almost a hundred years later, almost precisely the same crime.

Will the radiation burn the governor's longtime consigliere, Greg Abbott?  Time will tell, I suppose.  Texans who vote regularly don't seem to mind electing corrupt-as-hell Republicans.  It's the ones that haven't been voting in off-presidential years whose motivations will be under suspicion until we observe them changing their habits.

Tough break for Rick and his rebudding presidential aspirations, but on the bright side, Tom DeLay will eventually need a cellmate.

Update: Read more at Progress Texas about the $40,000 in taxpayer money he's already spent defending himself from these charges, and more from Truthyism tying everything together on Texas pay-to-play politics.

Since the veto, Perry’s office attempted to bribe Lehmberg out of office after failing to coerce her.   A message seems to be clear coming from the governor’s office that Lehmberg’s dismissal (was) more than just a matter of principle.  The desperation in which their tactics have led them seems to imply that Perry is less concerned about the drunk driving from Lehmberg and more worried over the success of the anti-corruption agency’s ability to police the current mid-term elections.

This would explain why gubernatorial candidate and current Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott was barely even acknowledged by Texas regulators when he took money from the Koch brothers immediately prior to hiding the location of possible explosive chemical storage sites from Texans.  Only a handful of media outlets were critical of Abbott during that exchange of election funds for possible favors, and it seems that the veto from Perry might have been a move to protect Greg Abbot’s election campaign from scrutiny that it does seem to merit.

And Harvey Kronberg asks the right question: Is Ken Paxton next?