Word has just come out from ABC News that a grand jury has indicted Texas Gov. Rick Perry on abuse of official capacity, a first-degree felony, and coercion of a public servant, a third-degree felony, after several months of investigation by a special prosecutor.
“A special prosecutor spent months calling witnesses and presenting evidence that Perry broke the law when he promised publicly to nix $7.5 million over two years for the public integrity unit, which is run by Travis County Democratic District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg’s office. It’s the same office that indicted U.S. Rep. Tom Delay as part of a finance probe.”
The grand jury indicted Gov. Perry for allegedly abusing the powers of his office by carrying out a threat to veto funding for state prosecutors investigating public corruption.
The decision to bring charges was not made lightly; “I took into account the fact that we’re talking about a governor of a state — and a governor of the state of Texas, which we all love,” Michael McCrum, the San Antonio-based special prosecutor, told reporters. “Obviously that carries a lot of importance. But when it gets down to it, the law is the law.”
(So the governor of Texas is not above the law. TeaPublicans, Steven Stockman, et. al take notice.)
Perry is the state of Texas’s first indicted governor in nearly a century. He was recently spotted touring Iowa testing a rebranding attempt, courting the “hipster vote” and talking immigration issues with his eyes on a 2016 Presidential bid.
This couldn’t happen to a more deserving individual. Personally, I hope he doesn’t resign, as remaining in office while he fights this will make his illegality all the more public.
True, Ricky Perry has kind of luck out. Texas has always had a higher than average poverty rate but is cheaper to live their California, so Perry uses these stats against California in the poverty rates. For example, the supplemential gives Los Angeles 27 percent and Houston only 19 percent while both are about the same under the old system around 21 and 22 percent. The oil boom has met that Texas added more jobs than California and Perry has use this and Perry bribes companies to his state with tax cuts. However, poverty is showing up in more whiter counties in Texas since not everyone gets an oil rig job or a professional job and Whites with bucks in Texas hire Hispanic immirgants to do yard work and maid work added to the poverty issue since Hispanic immiirgants tend to have larger families..
I live in Texas, and I’m familiar with the statistics. The Texas economic ‘miracle’ is not something that bears much close scrutiny. The fertilizer plant explosion in the town of West is a classic example. There were no fire codes in place, at all, because fire codes are illegal in Texas in counties having fewer than 200,000 people. The ‘chemical coast’ is a ticking time bomb.
What an absolutely uneducated statement. I too live in Texas – with family in West…and have worked in architectural companies designing buildings, factories, and coal plants. There are ALWAYS fire codes. To say fire codes are illegal when they are federally mandated is ignorant at best, and a lie at worst.
If you want to hate, that’s on Texas environmental regulatorsfor knowing they had low risk anhydrous ammonia, but no idea that they were storing highly explosive ammonium nitrate in large amounts.