The tribulations of David Dewhurst

He's as wounded as a wildebeest with a crocodile on his back.

For Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, a criminal investigation into how $1.3 million went missing from his campaign accounts, undetected over five years, perhaps couldn’t have come at a worse time.

As the presiding officer of the Texas Senate, which convenes Tuesday, Dewhurst faces a challenge to his decade-long leadership from ultraconservative Republicans, a split that also figured in his surprise defeat last summer in an expensive U.S. Senate primary race.

And thanks to the missing funds, the Houston multimillionaire has just over $7,200 left in his campaign account, which officeholders use during legislative sessions to supplement staff salaries and pay other bills. By law, he cannot raise any additional money until the session is over.

Fresh off his thrashing at the hands of Tea Party extremist Ted Cruz, and recently pushing all in on a 2014 re-election bid in which he essentially declared that nobody was going to get to his right, The Dew is as mad as he is capable of getting. But getting re-elected is probably the least of his short-term worries.

In the clubby 31-member Senate, how more than $1.3 million went missing from the campaign fund of an astute businessman known for his meticulous attention to detail, without anyone knowing, is the subject of an ongoing, quiet debate.

“This should be embarrassing for him,” said Craig McDonald, executive director of Texans for Public Justice, an ethics watchdog group. “He is responsible for overseeing how public money is spent, yet he can’t even keep track of campaign money.”

The power play is set to open the 83rd session Tuesday (or shortly thereafter).

In the Senate, the session’s opening days will carry special intrigue: whether conservative Republicans will carry out a quietly talked-about bid to overhaul rules to give themselves more power. Many longtime senators are betting not.

At issue is whether there are enough votes to restrict the power of Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, who presides over the Senate but is not considered to be conservative enough by some on the right, or to change a controversial rule that requires the consent of two-thirds of the members before a bill can be considered by the full Senate. Amending or dropping the two-thirds rule would give Republicans more power over legislation by limiting Democrats’ ability to block bills.

Recall that Democrats are one seat shy of the one-third minority to block, due to the passing of Mario Gallegos. No, they are not. As Charles points out in the comments, eleven is enough to block a 2/3rds majority. Now if you will excuse me, I'll wipe the egg off my face.

The reinforcement won't arrive for perhaps two more months (depending on when the governor schedules the run-off election for SD-6). So this early test of Dewhurst's power will simply reflect whether he can hold his caucus together or not. If a Republican or two defects to join the Dems in hewing to tradition, then Dewhurst's credibility is badly damaged. Not applicable, in light of above.

To me this makes for the most interesting development to open the session, since the Speaker tussle is without much drama. Dewhurst losing on the blocker bill* has a higher degree of probability then David Simpson getting elected Speaker of the House. *But not nearly as high as I thought.

Keep in mind that much of the time, the wildebeest gets away. But that's usually only because some smaller, weaker one becomes lunch.

2013's first Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance welcomes the opening of the Texas Legislature's 83rd session and hopes that it actually tries to make the Lone Star State a better place as it brings you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff discusses what some new state legislators are saying about education and the questions they should be asking but aren't.

The GOP is for more of the same -- demonizing the poor and less fortunate -- while the Democrats are for finding reality-based solutions that help everyone get ahead. WCNews at Eye on Williamson points this out: Fairness and equality (are) missing from Texas economy.

There were a few under-reported environmental developments in Texas last week, so PDiddie at Brains and Eggs reported on them.  

BossKitty at TruthHugger had to laugh at the low-brow War on Kwanzaa, then got riled at the Sunday Morning talk shows: Drop the script written by bitter old men!

Over at Texas Kaos, Libby Shaw explains how John Cornyn threatens to wreck our government. Check it out.

Neil at Texas Liberal posted that he left the woods for the safety of the city.

Sunday Funnies

In honor of today's featured Talking Heads guest...

Under-reported Texas environmental developments

-- Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons was fined some pocket change (to him) for making illegal campaign contributions to Texas legislators on behalf of his nuclear waste management PAC.

The committee — WCS-Texas Solutions PAC – made $64,500 in unauthorized political donations to Texas lawmakers in late 2011. The problem was that the PAC didn’t qualify as a legal PAC. The law requires that PACs have at least 10 contributors. The WCS PAC had only one — Simmons, who deposited $100,000 and then dispensed money to favored political candidates. Waste Control Specialists operates a nuclear-waste dump in West Texas. Had Simmons, who heads the company, made the donations directly in his own name, it would have been okay. But the 10-contributor law is aimed at making sure big donors don’t try to disguise their giving by doing so through a political committee.

For someone who gives as much money as Simmons does -- at $16.5 million, he was the third-largest contributor to the Mitt Romney campaign, behind Sheldon Adelson and Bob Perry -- this is positively ignorant. As Craig McDonald, the director of Texans for Public Justice noted...

“Let’s all pray Simmons takes more care in handling atomic waste than he does in handling his campaign contributions.”

-- The Exxon Mobil employees locally who oversee the pipeline in Montana, the one that leaked oil into the Yellowstone River last summer, apparently fell asleep on the job.

Delays in Exxon Mobil Corp.’s response to a major pipeline break beneath Montana’s Yellowstone River made the spill far worse than it otherwise would have been, federal regulators said.

Department of Transportation investigators examining the spill said pipeline controllers in Houston could have reduced the volume of the 1,500-barrel spill by about two-thirds if they isolated the rupture as soon as problems emerged.

Instead, crude drained from the severed, 12-inch pipeline for another 46 minutes before a remote control valve near the river was finally closed.

The July 1, 2011, spill fouled 70 miles of the riverbank along the scenic Yellowstone.

Does everybody understand now why there is so much opposition to the Keystone XL? I suppose the best response from conservative radicals would have to be: "Pipelines don't kill people".

-- After Shell's Arctic drill ship broke loose from its tugboat and beached itself on an Alaskan coastline, the Internet meme-ists sprung the trap. Again.

A hoax website mounted by environmental activists to highlight the dangers of Arctic drilling and mock Shell’s search for oil in the region is getting fresh attention in the wake of the grounding of one of the oil company’s Kulluk rig near Alaska.

The arcticready.com website — designed to look exactly just like Shell Oil Co.’s real website — is welcoming a surge of traffic as people take to the Internet to search for more information about the Kulluk. Only most of them don’t know it’s a spoof.

Yes, it was so good it fooled other environmental activists...and an NPR affiliate.

For instance, one environmentalist emailed a quote attributed to Shell but pulled from the site to reporters Tuesday night before issuing a mea culpa few minutes later.

On Wednesday morning, a radio host on the NPR station KUOW in Seattle quoted directly from the site and attributed these comments to Shell:

“No oil company has ever operated in an environment as extreme as the Arctic, let alone with heritage equipment—yet that’s exactly the sort of challenge that makes the Arctic so appealing to many of us at Shell. On the slight chance that something does go wrong, Shell’s spill cleanup plan is second to none. No one has yet fully determined how to clean up an oil spill in pack ice or broken ice—but that too is exactly the sort of challenge we love.”

Classic. Here's a picture, courtesy EcoWatch, of the Greenpeace billboards connected to the effort opposing Arctic drilling that appeared in Houston last summer.

Flickr has a few more.

Update: It turns out that Shell was trying to move the drilling rig before the end of the year -- in the dead of the Alaskan winter -- in order to avoid paying Alaskan taxes on it. They remain liable for the taxes (because it grounded on New Year's Eve), and now also for a multi-million dollar rescue operation. And if it starts leaking oil...