The legal and political maneuvering in regard to former Houston Congressman and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is hard to keep up with, so I rely on Kuff and others to keep me informed of what’s going on in that ongoing saga. However, this Austin American-Statesman article on a seemingly innocuous aspect of the legal battle caught my eye.
Seems as if the Chronicle filed a request in March under Texas’ open records law for vouchers, travel receipts, budget documents, memos and e-mails in regard to the expenses of Travis County DA Ronnie Earle’s investigations of DeLay and related cases of DeLay’s associates. Earle rejected the Chronicle request and appealed to Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who ruled that that the law requires disclosure of “information in an account, voucher, or contract” relating to the expenditure of public monies.
Rather than simply complying with what appears to be a straightforward open records request and ruling, Earle announced this past Monday that he had sued Abbott in an attempt to avoid public disclosure of the information, claiming that such a release “could adversely effect public safety.”
Release of travel receipts “could adversely effect public safety”? (I think Earle meant “affect”). H’mm. Stayed tuned on this one. Kevin Whited has more here. Hat tip to Letter of Apology for the link to the article.

After failing to convict former HealthSouth chairman and CEO Richard Scrushy in a highly-publicized business fraud prosecution almost exactly a year ago, federal prosecutors obtained a conviction of Scrushy and former Alabama governor Don E. Siegleman on multiple bribery, conspiracy and mail fraud charges relating to Scrushy’s alleged bribe to Siegleman of $500,000 to procure a seat on a state regulatory board that oversees hospital construction projects. Two other defendants — a onetime Siegleman aide Paul Hamrick and former head of the Alabama transportation department, Gary Roberts — were acquitted on all charges.
Interestingly, the Scrushy-Siegleman jury had reported to the judge on several occasions over the 11 days of deliberations that It was deadlocked, and it is not immediately clear from news reports what ended the deadlock. In this particular case, Scrushy’s defense team attempted to sway the predominantly black jury by comparing Scrushy to civil-rights figures of the 1950’s and 60’s who suffered injustice in Alabama and the deep South. Scrushy’s defense team even included Alabama lawyer Fred D. Gray, who represented Rosa Parks when she was arrested in 1955 for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. As you might expect, prosecutors denounced the Scrushy defense team’s strategy as a racially-motivated attempt to influence the jury while contending that Scrushy was simply using his money and power to gain political influence to help HealthSouth.
The 53-year-old Scrushy was convicted on six counts and faces a potential sentence of over 20 years in prison. Sentencing is expected to take place this fall.

The Supreme Court issued its long-awaited decision yesterday (earlier posts here) ordering congressional districts in south Texas redrawn because a 2003 redistricting map orchestrated by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was designed to disenfranchise Hispanic voters so that vulnerable Republican incumbent Rep. Henry Bonilla could maintain his seat. However, a sharply-split Court rejected a broader Democratic challenge to the DeLay redistricting plan that prompted the new Republican majority in the Texas Legislature to throw out existing districts in favor of new ones designed for partisan benefit. Charles Kuffner, who has followed the redistricting case closely, has more here and an extensive archive on the case here. Amy Howe passes along what appears to be an interesting error in the opinion, a pdf of which is here.
The bottom line on this incredibly split-decision (the justices filed six separate opinions concurring and dissenting from parts of the ruling) is that that Justice Anthony Kennedy’s controlling opinion leaves open the possibility that the Court could step in someday to set limits for partisan gerrymanders if future litigants find “a manageable, reliable measure of fairness” for doing so. Four liberal-leaning justices joined Justice Kennedy in concluding that the south Texas districts violated the Voting Rights Act and must be redrawn. But Justice Kennedy and the four more conservative justices concluded that the state-wide map complied with Constitutional requirements and that a second district — which Democrats claimed disenfranchised black voters in Austin — posed no voting-rights violation. Just to give you an idea of how the Court is all over the place on these issus, Justices Thomas and Scalia would have simply dismissed the case as beyond the scope of the courts to resolve, while several Justices — including Samuel Alito and John Roberts — were in a group that left open the possibility that the Court might in the future come up with a legal test to be applied in this type of case.

According to this NY Times article, Eliot Spitzer needs to bone up a bit on his western New York geography.

Former WWII hero, Texas senator, Dukakis Vice-Presidential candidate and Clinton Administration Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen died Tuesday in Houston. He was 85 at the time of death and had been largely out of the public eye for the past seven years or so after suffering a stroke. The Houston Chronicle story on his life is here.
Bentsen was a genuinely charming man and successful businessman who often seemed somewhat out of place in the dog-eat-dog world of politics in Texas and Washington. His political mentor was former legendary House speaker, Sam Rayburn, but Bentsen was not particularly close to the other Texas political icon of the 1950’s and 60’s, former President Lyndon B. Johnson. Most of Bentsen’s political career occurred after Johnson had left office.
Bentsen was a member of the traditional part of the Texas Democratic Party that dominated Texas politics for over a century after Reconstruction, and he re-entered politics in the early 1970’s to run against the standard-bearer of the more liberal faction of the party, Ralph Yarborough. Thus, Bentsen often sided with Republicans in political decisions, although he resisted the temptation to switch to the Republican Party as his Texas Democratic Party contemporary, former Texas Governor John Connally, did in the early 1970’s.
Bentsen’s popularity in Texas is perhaps best reflected by the fact that he won the 1988 Senate race by a large margin despite the fact that the Dukakis-Bentsen Presidential ticket lost the state to the Bush-Quayle ticket. Although Bentsen was able to help stem the demise of the Texas Democratic Party for a couple of decades, he and others in his faction of the party ultimately lost the war as the Republican Party began dominating Texas politics about the time that Bentsen retired from politics in 1994. After his retirement, Bentsen prepared an oral autobiography of his political and business career, which will remain confidential for five years after the date of his death.
A memorial service for Bentsen is tentatively scheduled for next Tuesday at First Presbyterian Church in Houston after a private graveside service at Forest Park Lawndale Cemetery.

If you have any interest in Texas politics, then you will want to check out this NY Sunday Times article on Ben Barnes, pictured on the far right with former House Speaker Gus Mutscher, former Governor Preston Smith, former president Lyndon Johnson. Barnes is the now 68 year-old elder (some would say elder gadfly) of the Texas Democratic Party who was Speaker of the Texas House at the age of 26, Lieutenant Governor at 30 and washed up in politics at 34 in the wake of the Sharpstown scandal. The NY Times article notes the publication of Barnes’ semi-autobiographical book, Barn Burning, Barn Building (Big Sky Press 2006) about his political career and the future of the Texas Democratic Party.
Despite leaving government 34 years ago, Barnes remains a fascinating character of Texas politics. He and the late John Connally made headlines in the late 1980’s when their highly-leveraged real estate development business melted down into bankruptcy, although neither faced any criminal prosecution as a result of the business failure (high-profile bankruptcies did not necessarily result in criminal prosecutions back in those days). In the 1990’s, Barnes was a member of a group that banked $23 million in a buyout of their lobbyist contract with Gtech, the gambling industry company that ran the Texas lottery under then Texas Lottery chairperson and current White House counsel, Harriet E. Miers. A subsequent lawsuit generated the 1999 deposition in which Barnes alleged for the first time that he had pulled strings as Speaker of the Texas House in 1968 to get President Bush into the National Guard and out of possible service in Vietnam. In a later highly-publicized 60 Minutes II interview during the 2004 presidential campaign, Barnes said he regretted that he had done so. Recently, Barnes has ruffled feathers in the Texas Democratic Party by supporting an independent candidate, Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, rather than the Democratic Party nominee, Chris Bell.
Over the past fifteen years or so, the Democratic Party has become an afterthought in Texas politics, which has not been a healthy development for the state. Barnes’ book likely will include at least some insight into why that has occurred and, in so doing, perhaps provide some guidance on how the party can resurrect itself. If so, that just might be Barnes’ most valuable contribution to Texas politics.

A.M. “Abe” Rosenthal, the former editor of The New York Times for 17 years through the 1970’s and 80’s, died Wednesday at the age 84 from the effects of a stroke suffered two weeks ago.
Probably the biggest story that the Times broke under Rosenthal was the publication in 1971 of the Pentagon Papers — confidential government papers on America’s secret involvement in Vietnam — which won the Times one of its many Pulitzer Prizes awarded while Rosenthal was editor. The Pentagon Papers revealed that every Presidential administration since World War II had enlarged America’s involvement in Vietnam while hiding the extent of that commitment, but publication of the papers was risky given their classified nature. The Nixon Administration tried to suppress publication of the papers, which led to to a landmark Supreme Court decision upholding the primacy of the press over government attempts to impose “prior restraint” on what may be printed.
The best story about Rosenthal, however, is the one involving his forced retirement from the Times, which was not pleasant. In the mid-80’s, Rosenthal stepped down as editor of the Times and became a columnist for the newspaper. But in 1999, after 40 plus years with the Times, Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. rather unceremoniously dumped Rosenthal with no explanation. Rosenthal made clear that his leaving the Times was not his idea, telling one reporter that he should not report that he retired because it “would imply volition.” Then, when a young female Washington Post reporter asked him whether he had been fired, Rosenthal famously replied:

“Sweetheart, you can use any word you want.”

While perusing the Chronicle over the past couple of days, I came across this article about the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission quietly suspending a program of stepping up arrests of intoxicated bar patrons after state legislators scheduled a hearing this week to investigate complaints from the public ó and legislators ó about how the arrests were being carried out.
I’m not a patron of bars, so I didn’t think much more about the article until yesterday, when I read this follow-up article about the hearing. State Senator John Whitmire of Houston, who co-chaired the hearing and is usually quite supportive of the TABC, was reportedly outraged by the “cowboy attitude” exhibited by TABC agents, which included storming targeted bars while outfitted in full-SWAT team gear. Other committee members reported stories of patrons forced up against a wall en masse. In fact, a number of witnesses testified about being arrested without a sobriety test and, in one case, of being arrested after passing a Breathalyzer test. At one point, TABC even invited a local television camera crew to film their sting operations!
Now, let me get this straight. Alcohol control agents are dressing in SWAT gear to raid bars where people are drinking, all for a spot on the 10 o’clock news?
My sense is that we could use a bit of housecleaning at the TABC.

This Sunday Washington Post op-ed by John Feehery, Tom DeLay‘s former Communications Director, provides an interesting perspective on DeLay’s fall — that DeLay’s strength of being willing to delegate was offset by his attraction to those who were willing to cut corners to win:

The overwhelming majority of DeLay’s staffers were professional, honest and working in Congress for the right reasons. But Tom prized the most aggressive staffers and most often heeded their counsel . . . A former hockey player, Tony Rudy was DeLay’s enforcer; he wasn’t evil, but lacked maturity and would do whatever necessary to protect his patron. Ed Buckham, DeLay’s chief of staff, gatekeeper and minister, constantly pushed DeLay to be more radical in his tactics and spun webs of intrigue we are only now beginning to unravel. And Michael Scanlon, who, in my experience, was a first-class rogue and a master of deception. People like Rudy and Scanlon pleased DeLay because they were always pushing the envelope . . . I don’t know if Tom always knew what his staff was doing — I know that I didn’t. But I had my suspicions, and now I have seen them borne out.

Check out the entire piece. Hat tip to Josh Marshall.

On the heels of her cameo at the Lay-Skilling trial, the ubiquitous one — Houston Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee — gets more camera time standing next to colleague Cynthia McKinney apologizing about waylaying a Capital Hill police officer. Slampo will be pleased.
Meanwhile, Eric Berger reports that Ms. Jackson Lee has gotten her way with regard to a matter of utmost importance to the Gulf Coast region.
You can’t make this stuff up.