Reply to Rick Perry Indicted for Abuse of Power

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[quote=Anonymous]I am not a Rick Perry supporter, but there's just no way these charges are going to stick.

This is a good summary of even left-leaning/Democrat pundits who think it doesn't make sense:

[quote]Perry, an expected presidential candidate in 2016, is accused of "abuse of official capacity" and "coercion of [a] public servant" by publicly threatening to zero out a state prosecutor's funding and then actually doing it. Several pundits, including former Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod, Clinton and Obama administration alum Jonathan Prince, Vox's Matt Yglesias, and New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait, wrote on Twitter they couldn't see what the big deal was.

"Unless he was demonstrably trying to scrap the ethics unit for other than his stated reason," Axelrod argued, "Perry indictment seems pretty sketchy."

"Have to say Perry indictment seems nuts. Gov has constitutional power to veto. Gov uses power. Grand jury indicts bc they don't like reason?" Prince asked.

"Hard for me to imagine these Rick Perry charges sticking," Yglesias wrote, adding, "Does anyone think this Perry indictment makes sense?"

"My *very* preliminary reaction to the Rick Perry news: I don't understand what law he broke," Chait opined.

ThinkProgress, the liberal-oriented news site, reported that Perry's own attorneys "may have a point" when they argued his veto of the prosecutor funding "was made in accordance with the veto authority afforded to every governor under the Texas Constitution."

"The Texas Constitution gives the governor discretion to decide when to sign and when to veto a bill, as well as discretion to veto individual line-items in an appropriation bill. Though the state legislature probably could limit this veto power in extreme cases — if a state governor literally sold his veto to wealthy interest groups, for example, the legislature could almost certainly make that a crime — a law that cuts too deep into the governor’s veto power raises serious separation of powers concerns," ThinkProgress wrote. "Such laws would rework the balance of power between the executive and the legislature established by the state constitution, and they would almost certainly be unconstitutional."

The Lawyers, Guns & Money blog appeared to agree.

"I’m as contemptuous of Perry as anyone, but this seems really thin," the site said in a post reacting to the indictment. "To the extent that the statute reaches Perry’s behavior, itself kind of a stretch, it’s hard to see how the statute is consistent with the separation of powers established by the state constitution."

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/liberals-criticize-rick-perry-indictment-2014-8#ixzz3AskGGK00

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