Monday, August 18, 2014

Who Are ‘Texans for Public Justice,’ and Why Does Their Role in the Perry Case Matter?

The current case against Perry was brought through a complaint filed by Texans for Public Justice. Media inside Texas are occasionally mentioning TPJ’s role, but they are not detailing what TPJ actually is. - Bryan Preston/PJMedia
Even a cursory glance at their website is revealing. TPJ claims to be a public integrity watchdog, but their quest for integrity is entirely one-sided. They never take on Democrats. TPJ exists to attack Republicans, and they have been doing nothing but that for years. TPJ is even trying to get Delay’s convictions re-instated.

There is more to TPJ than mere partisanship masquerading as “public integrity.”

According to its own 2013 annual report, Texans for Public Justice is funded by the hard left....

The Open Society Foundations and the Sunlight Foundation are both funded by leftwing billionaire and convicted felon George Soros. Why is a group that sells itself as a public integrity watchdog accepting funds from a man who was convicted of insider trading? Why is no one in the Texas media asking TPJ that very question?

Texans for Public Justice is part of a larger network of money and operatives that the Texas Democrats in exile set up with one goal — to recapture power that the voters took away from them. They set themselves a deadline of electing a Democrat speaker of the Texas House of Representatives by 2010. They failed in that goal. The Texas Republicans expanded their hold on the House that year.

But the network, run by out-of-state leftwing operative Matt Angle, never went away. It won’t as long as money keeps rolling in....learn MORE, at the link.
Networks Ignore that Group Behind Perry’s Indictment Got $500K from Soros - Mike Ciandella/Newsbusters
...In what appeared to have been a slip of the tongue, Texans for Public Justice Director Craig McDonald told CNN “the governor again, in his defense yesterday, said this is merely a partisan, political witch hunt. Nothing could be closer to the truth.”
The weirdest part of the Rick Perry indictment - Philip Klein/Washington Examiner @philipklein

t didn't take long for it to become widely accepted — and not just among conservatives — that Friday's indictment of Gov. Rick Perry, R-Texas, rests on a razor-thin legal premise. MSNBC host Ari Melber called the case "very weak" while Jonathan Chait of New York magazine declared the indictment "unbelievably ridiculous." Even former senior advisor to President Obama, David Axelrod, wrote on Twitter that the indictment seemed "pretty sketchy." But perhaps the weirdest part about the indictment isn't just that it's without merit, but that the underlying dispute it highlights actually makes Perry look good.

Politics as Combat - Andrew C. McCarthy/National Review

It has come to this after six years of Barack Obama’s Chicago-style community-organizer governance: The hard Left no longer believes it necessary to pretend that the rule of law matters. It is politics as combat....

Under Texas law, Perry has incontestable constitutional authority to veto legislation — he doesn’t need a reason. But in this instance, he had abundant reason. Quite apart from the pernicious, politicized law enforcement for which the Travis County district attorney’s office is notorious, Rosemary Lehmberg, the district attorney, was arrested last year for drunken driving. Though she is hardly fit to run a public corruption unit, Democrats in the Texas state legislature nevertheless pushed through a $7.5 million appropriation. Perry responded with an ultimatum: Either Lehmberg would tender her resignation, or he would veto the funds.

Mind you, if Perry had said nothing and simply vetoed the measure, no one would have a plausible objection. Instead, he reasonably explained his position and indicated that Austin could have the money if the compromised district attorney stepped down. But somehow, in the telling of Austin’s partisan prosecutors, such a veto is no longer a political exercise; it’s felony extortion for which Perry could be sentenced to decades in prison.

The Founders gave us a republican democracy which, at the federal and state levels, divides authority among the political branches and assumes — indeed, demands — that the branches flex the muscles they’ve been given to check each other’s excesses. The competition plays out at the ballot box, not in the courts — much less the criminal courts. Perry’s veto, to block funding for a prosecutor’s office with a checkered record and an unfit leader, is plainly what the founders contemplated: an exercise of legitimate political authority to rein in the excesses of a competing branch. Yet, the politicized Austin prosecutors depict it not as normal political give and take; they frame Perry as if he were a mafia don.