The Weekly Wrangle

With this week's blog post roundup, the Texas Progressive Alliance is really looking forward to the third presidential debate this Wednesday.  Really.  Looking.  Forward.

Off the Kuff published two interviews designed to help Houston voters make up their minds on the recapture referendum.

Libby Shaw at Daily Kos is delighted to learn that Trump's scandals could impact down ballot candidates, even in Texas. Texas GOP is Frightened By Trump's Scandals. Dems could sweep Harris County.

Socratic Gadfly looks at Ruth Bader Ginsberg's recent disrespect for the spirit of the First Amendment, including noting how this refutes "oh the SCOTUS" claims of two-party-only voters.

A reporter arrested at the North Dakota pipeline protest has been charged with three felony violations carrying a 45-year maximum sentence.  Txsharon at Bluedaze passes along a letter of support for Deia Schlosberg, and a reminder that we don't arrest or charge journalists in the United States who are just doing their jobs because, you know, First Amendment.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme is not surprised that Texas lawmakers want to take more anonymous goodies from donors. They love the rich.

Egberto Willies comments on the ProPublica story where a five-year-old girl told the author's son on the playground: "only white people".

Texas Leftist is again conducting candidate interviews via questionnaire for downballot candidates in the Houston region.

Some pictures and video of Jill Stein's Texas tour this past weekend were posted by PDiddie at Brains and Eggs.

Neil at All People Have Value took his public art sign-carrying effort to Atlanta, Georgia. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

The editor of the Lewisville Texan Journal says that when your path is uncertain, hit the road.

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More blog posts from across our beloved Texas!

The Texas Moratorium Network advances the 'March to Abolish the Death Penalty', at the Capitol in Austin, on October 29th.

The latest Texas Watch podcast sees the insurance lobby setting the table for the next legislative session.

Jef Rouner exercises his binary logic to remind Democrats that their votes aren't wasted by repeating the logical fallacy that not voting for Democrats is a waste.

At the Texas Observer, Joe Lansdale explains why his East Texas neighbors are voting for Trump, and John Wright asks on behalf of Texas greens: "Won't Someone Think of the (Fracked) Children?"

Michael Barajas laments another ridiculous aspect of our state's antiquated beer laws.

Grits for Breakfast takes note of the vast resources being consumed by the state in criminalizing drug addiction.

Lisa Gray collects local stories of sexual assault in the wake of "grab her by the p*ssy" and "it was just locker room talk".

Shari Biediger eulogizes longtime San Antonio Democratic activist Choco Meza.

Lone Star Ma encourages Rep. Blake Farenthold's constituents to give him some feedback on his defense of rape culture.

Houston Strategies has a story about the recent 'saving' of the Astrodome in an aggreposting.

And the Digital Heretic points out why distrust of the corporate media is at an all-time high. 

Vote "fraud" investigation ongoing in Tarrant County

Captain Ahab Greg Abbott and his third mate Flask Ken "I Know Fraud" Paxton are hot on the scent of the elusive Moby Dick.

Less than a month before the Nov. 8 election, allegations of voter fraud in Tarrant County are under investigation by the state, prompting concern that the timing may intimidate some voters — and possibly lay groundwork for the Legislature to enact more restrictions on voting next year.

The complaints focus on mail-in ballots, which allow people to vote from their homes without any ID or verification of identity.

Supporters have long said mail-in balloting is crucial for overseas residents, the military and senior citizens. Critics maintain that such voting is ripe for abuse and raises concerns about “vote harvesting,” in which people could fill out and return other people’s ballots.

Some say the investigation is politically motivated; others say it’s addressing a practice that has been a problem for years.

"The Republicans have been looking for a blockbuster case to demonstrate that voter fraud isn’t just a series of small mistakes," said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. "If some of these allegations turn out to be true, they may finally have their white whale."

Herman Melville thanks you, Professor Rottinghaus.

“Whether there is lawbreaking or not, the issue of voting is polarized and revelations this close to an election are bound to have an effect on Democratic Party and affiliated groups’ efforts to get out the vote. Voters may be hesitant to sign up for or vote through a mail-in ballot, let alone give it to someone else. This may reduce turnout in some heavily Democratic areas that utilize this process.”

Local officials say workers with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office have been in the reliably red Tarrant County gathering paperwork and interviewing potential witnesses.

The attorney general’s office declined to “confirm or deny investigations” or comment on the situation. When asked for the complaints that started the local investigation, attorney general’s workers declined to release them, expressing concern that doing so might hamper a criminal investigation.

There's a lot more, and also at the Dallas News if you like.  Abbott is really turned on about getting somebody under his wheels.

Largest Voter Fraud Investigation in Texas History Underway in Tarrant County. We will crush illegal voting. #tcot https://t.co/EoQSsWEQnn

— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) October 7, 2016

I'm just going to sit back and wait, as his witchhunts have typically come up dry.

If they have something, they'll show something.  If they don't have anything they'll still show something, even if it's the same old nothing.  I just can't get worked up this late in the cycle about the little boy in the wheelchair who constantly cries wolf.

Jill Stein's Texas tour, in pics and video

El Paso, last Friday:

Lots and lots and LOTS of coverage from El Paso media, en Espanol y Ingles.  And these following are from Houston's rally Saturday afternoon.

Courting voters in Houston! @GreenPartyUS @DrJillStein takes stage #KHOU11 #HouNews pic.twitter.com/7tanAeTshx

— Grace White (@GraceWhiteKHOU) October 15, 2016

More coming from San Antonio (today) and Austin (tomorrow).

Sunday Unshackled Funnies

Hickman, Gonzalez, Soros, Ogg, and the judge who switched parties

-- A spirited debate last night between the two Harris County Sheriff candidates, Tommy Thomas Ron Hickman and Adrian Garcia Ed Gonzalez.

The biggest surprise was that both guys oppose campus carry.  I still expect Gonzalez to win this election because of all the cycle's factors working against Hickman -- high Latin@ registration, Trump's radioactivity down the ballot, the appointed incumbent's poor handling of the county jail's varying and continuing crises, etc. -- but like Hillary Clinton, Gonzalez is making it closer than it should be.  If you buy the last polling result.

-- He supported Morris Overstreet in the Democratic primary for Harris County District Attorney, and I thought that would be good enough for a win, but I was wrong.  And now that guy (his first name is "Billionaire", doncha know) pushes all in for Kim Ogg.

The latest ($500,000) Soros contribution arrives just days after the Ogg campaign filed a quarterly finance report showing she received nearly $135,000 in campaign contributions from a PAC supported by Steve Mostyn, another major Democratic financier.

Incumbent Republican District Attorney Devon Anderson's political consultant, Allan Blakemore, trumpeted the Soros ad buy, accusing Ogg of aligning forces seeking to buy the district attorney's office.

"She has abandoned the values and standards of our community to become a puppet for those whose clear agenda is to corrupt the rule of law in Harris County," Blakemore said.

Blakemore forgot to use the word 'morals', or maybe he was just smart enough not to go there with an incumbent DA whose prosecutors jail mentally ill rape victims.  It's almost as predictable as Dan Patrick bleating about bathrooms while trumpeting you-know-who.

Wayne Dolcefino, a spokesman for the Ogg campaign, welcomed the contribution, adding that the race has received national attention following the jailing of a rape victim during Anderson's tenure.

"We welcome contributions from anyone in the country who wants to make people safer and actually remember what justice is," Dolcefino said. "This is a local election, but Devon's conduct has made this a national race."

This race shouldn't be close either, but Harris County Republicans may be able to muster for Anderson and hold on.  That would be a real shame for the second time.

-- There's a new Democrat in town, recently surfacing on one of the Houston region's two state Court of Appeals, and his name isn't Reggie Hammond or even Jim Sharp.

Justice Terry Jennings of the Texas First Court of Appeals, who has generated national news coverage by switching political parties, said the reaction has been "remarkably positive."

"I've even gotten Facebook messages from New Zealand," the Houston-based justice said Thursday by phone.

Jennings announced Saturday at the Harris County Democratic Party's Johnson, Rayburn & Richards Dinner that, after much reflection, he had decided to leave the Republican Party.

How much reflection and for how long, I wonder.

"...When I first ran for the Court of Appeals in 2000, moderates were welcome in the GOP," he said in his speech. "I was proud to run as a Republican -- the party of my father. Sadly, today in the Republican party, "moderate" is a dirty word. And today's Republican party has chosen a dark path I cannot take."

Stay woke, Justice Jennings.  Unfortunately he's on the ballot in two years, and all signs point to that being another wipeout for Democrats everywhere.

Jennings [...] said he probably will wait until spring to decide whether to run again in 2018.

I'll guess 'retirement from the bench and a lucrative partnership with a local powerhouse firm'.  Still wonder why people say Republicans and Democrats are all the same?  You shouldn't.

Texas doubles down on going after voters without ID

Charles Kufffner (and many others, like the Center, TX, Light and Champion)) have been on this; here's a few of the latest developments and some legal interpretation from Joseph Kulhavy of the Texas Election Law blog.

On September 22, 2016, the Texas House of Representatives Elections Committee conducted a routine interim hearing on various technical matters relating to election administration. For three and a half hours the committee members and witnesses discussed proposed legislative tweaks to the petition signature process, to municipal elections, to obligation bonds and taxes, and so on. You can watch the whole hearing if that’s your thing, but for my money the really interesting stuff doesn’t come up until the very end ...

As the hearing wrapped up, State Representative Celia Israel asked an official from the Texas Secretary of State’s office about a court order that had been issued two days prior to the committee hearing. In particular, Representative Israel was curious to find out what the State was doing to educate voters about I.D. requirements for the November 8, 2016, election.

In response to the questions, Director of Elections Keith Ingram explained that the State had incorporated the text of the court’s most recent directive into the website and upcoming print and media advertising; he specified that voters who “do not possess [the statutorily mandated forms of photo I.D.] and cannot reasonably obtain it,” could cast a regular ballot by completing a “Declaration of Reasonable Impediment,” if they also supplied alternate forms of documentary evidence of their identity.

Representative Mike Schofield then took the discussion in a new direction (starting at the 3 hour, 36 minute mark), after asking if the State could track information about whether the Declarations were submitted by people who actually have I.D.:

What I don’t want to see is a gross number, and everybody acts as if those people don’t have I.D…. If you pretend you don’t have it, and use one of these declarations, that’s illegal, isn’t it?

In response to the question, Mr. Ingram clarified that voters entitled to use the Declaration would be those who had either never been issued one of the six forms of photo I.D. listed under the law, or those whose previously issued I.D.s had been lost or destroyed, and who had a reasonable impediment to replacing the missing I.D.

Representative Israel raised a hypothetical situation (described starting at 3 hours 45 minutes) in which a voter’s “reasonable impediment” is that the voter is voting at a polling place on one end of town, but left her photo I.D. at home, at the other end of town.

In that circumstance, Mr. Ingram explained that assuming that the voter filled out the “Declaration” and wrote down that the reasonable impediment was “left my I.D. at home,” the election worker would have to take the declaration at face value and allow the voter to cast a ballot.

Representative Schofield seemed incredulous, asking, “Is that … is that correct? … You’re going to let them vote with a ‘Reasonable Impediment?'”

The Director of Elections responded:

The poll worker cannot challenge the ‘Reasonable Impediment’ asserted by the voter. …. But if that’s the reasonable impediment, I think the voter is at risk, because they’re not following the law. But that’s not for the poll worker to decide. [Emphasis added by Kulhavey.]

Committee vice-chair Craig Goldman then asked, “But, how does that get challenged, and then how is their vote null and void?”

The Director of Elections explained:

The vote will never be null and void. It’ll get challenged in an election contest, if it’s a close election. And obviously these things [the Declarations of Reasonable Impediment] will be available for folks to give to their district attorneys to follow up on. [Emphasis added by Kulhavy.]

Representative Schofield pressed the issue as the hearing entered its final minutes (at the 3 hour 46 minute mark):

I realize we’re going to have a lot of illegal votes and a lot of fraudulent votes. That’s why we have voter I.D. My concern is that there are going to be a lot of people trying to thwart the [voter I.D.] law who have valid drivers’ licenses; who have passports; and are going to assert these declarations. Their votes may count in this election, but I want to make sure that when we go back to court, we’re not saying ‘oh, there’s this huge number of people that filed these declarations.’ I want to drill down and find out which one of ’em [declarations] were bogus. [Emphasis added by Kulhavy.]

The Director of Elections responded, “And I’ll think you’ll be able to tell easily.” He then went on describe how one of the Declarations of Reasonable Impediment that had already been used in an off-season tax ratification election indicated that one voter had written that the “reasonable impediment” was “fascist law.”

The committee chair said: “Fascist law? They wrote that?”

Let's pause here for  moment to summarize.  The state of Texas, here represented by Mike Schofield and Craig Goldman, with an assist from Keith Ingram, is setting the stage for the prosecution of Texas voters on the basis of what is or isn't -- attempting to define the term legally, in the most onerous way -- 'reasonable impediment' for a voter to producing their photo ID.  Continuing ...

What’s troubling about the exchange (aside from Representative Schofield’s counterfactual and inflammatory assertion that there’s going to be a lot of “fraudulent votes” in this election), and what should be especially troubling to the plaintiffs in the voter I.D. lawsuit, is the implication -- encouraged both by Representative Schofield’s assertion that “we’re going to have a lot of illegal votes,” and by the response from the Director of Elections that voters who use the Declaration can be tracked, and possibly referred to local district attorneys for prosecution for illegal voting—that voting without an approved photo I.D. is automatically suspect. (Emphasis is mine.)

So ... why is this suggestion of potential criminal prosecution troubling?

Because it is not a stretch to imagine that statements like this could have a chilling effect -- dissuading eligible, qualified voters without approved photo I.D. from voting. In other words, threatening to investigate voters who file a Reasonable Impediment Declaration could end up hurting the very group of voters that the August 10, 2016, court order was intended to help.

Think I’m exaggerating about “threatening to investigate”?

On September 9, 2016, Rick Hasen (...) posted a story on his Election Law Blog about the motion for enforcement of the August 10 court order filed by the private (non-Department of Justice) plaintiffs in Veasey v. Perry. These plaintiffs were reacting to this August 26, 2016, news story (as quoted in the private plaintiff’s motion):

[Harris County Clerk Stan] Stanart says he will investigate everyone who signs that form to assure they are not lying. Whether anything happens, that’s up to the [Harris County District Attorney’s Office]. But after the votes are counted and the election ends, Stanart said his office will be checking to see whether a person who signed the sworn statement has a Texas Department of Public Safety-issued ID through the DPS database.” (Meagan Flynn, Harris County Clerk Will Vet Voters Who Claim to Lack Photo ID, HOUSTON PRESS, Aug. 26, 2016.)

So to recap: As of late August in a presidential election year, the chief election official in Harris County, the most heavily populated county in Texas, was quoted as intending to investigate voters who claim they lack photo I.D.s.

That threat of punitive or retributive investigation prompted the federal district court in Corpus Christi to issue on September 20 a legal order, in which the court told the State to clarify and make explicit that voters who reasonably lacked photo I.D. were legally entitled to an alternate method of qualifying for a regular ballot. [Emphasis Mukavy's.]

But then in the hearing on September 22, just two days after the court order, the State was still discussing the option of criminal investigations and prosecutions of voters without photo I.D.s, in order to satisfy a Republican state legislator’s concerns about the effective enforcement of the State’s photo I.D. law.

And the statements of the Director of Elections reassuring Representative Schofield that voters who vote without photo I.D. can be tracked and investigated echoed the statements made in August by Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart.

Kulhavy has more background and interpretation, but the gist of it is that the Republican leadership of Texas wants to continue hindering and harassing voters they don't approve of (i.e., might for vote for Democrats) by any and all means necessary.

Thus it is left to President Hillary Clinton and her attorney general, with some support from the Supreme Court Justice she appoints -- and that ultimately gets confirmed by a Democratic Senate in 2017 -- to restore the VRA, put Texas back into preclearance, and fix some of the other ridiculous shit that (Republican) Texas insists on mucking up.

With the above assumptions in place, there should be a flood of new federal judges who are appointed, confirmed, and put to work in short order next year, as the worst conservative nightmares about the judiciary start coming true.

(Update: Harry Enten at FiveThrtyEight reports today that even as Madam President surges ahead of The Barking Yam, her down-ballot Senate coattails are shortening, not lengthening.  Much of the success of Clinton's first two years  in office -- I submit all of it domestically -- rests on having a Senate that will not obstruct her every initiative.)

I'm taking all that as what is going to happen, not what could happen.  Because even though I won't ever vote for her, I plan on holding to her to a higher standard of accountability than many of those who will be.  You might call that unfair; I call it pragmatic.

She can come up short on fracking, the TPP, and Citizens United, but if she's not willing to straighten out Greg Abbott, Ken Paxton, et.al. with respect to voting rights, then she's going to be an even weaker and lousier president than I suspect she will be.