Governor Impeachable? [View All]

[NoPasaran]

Poor Gov. Rick Perry.

It's not enough that he has Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn nipping at his heels about this or that budget fiasco every other day, and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison waiting in the wings for the right moment to make her grand entrance, and even GOP operatives floating Don "Mr. Moneybags" Evans as yet another potential rival to the Mansion. Now a handful of legislators have taken it into their heads to start talking impeachment. It's getting so the governor can't cross the border for a few days to lecture the Mexicans on energy policy without somebody taking the opportunity to stick pins in his effigy back home.

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The discussion has focused on three episodes, each of which has featured the governor dancing on the edge of ethical impropriety, if not outright illegality. The first was Perry's irritated comment a few weeks ago to a group of Dallas school district officials, saying they should not hope for a better deal on school finance from the courts, because Perry happened to know that his appointees to the Texas Supreme Court would vote in favor of the state. That sounded enough like tampering to make a couple of those justices run for verbal cover.

More recently, Strayhorn accused Perry of manipulating a legislative audit of her agency in an attempt to find favoritism in her tax case decisions (or, as she put it, asking the taxpayers to fund the governor's "political opposition research"). The governor's office duly dismissed Strayhorn's charges, and whatever the truth of the matter, Perry has been sufficiently insulated by the Legislature, which targeted its own punitive measures at the comptroller, to make it unlikely that a battle on those grounds can be more than rhetorical.

But the third line of inquiry apparently holds more promise. As was first revealed by Republican Sen. Jane Nelson of Lewisville in the blowup over "slots for tots," last December the Lottery Commission paid $250,000 to a Las Vegas law firm to draft special interest legislation that would have legalized slot machines at a half-dozen venues across the state. The specific firm was hired at the suggestion of Perry chief of staff Mike Toomey, whose defense has been that he was only "passing on a name" recommended to him by Rep. Kent Grusendorf, R-Arlington, chair of the House Public Education Committee. (Grusendorf apparently keeps lists handy of Vegas lawyers in anticipation of just such an opportunity.)

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http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2004-07-09/pols_capitol.html