Off the Kuff Rotating Header Image

April 23rd, 2013:

Who resigns after a DUI arrest?

Apr 23rd, 2013
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

The Statesman asks the question and gets some answers.

Rosemary Lehmberg

In 2006, District Attorney Tim Cole had a decision to make. The then-chief prosecutor for Montague, Clay and Archer counties had been arrested for drunken driving after a day of July Fourth celebrating at a lake across the state line in Oklahoma.

It didn’t take him long to conclude he could no longer in good conscience continue being the chief law enforcement officer in the community northwest of Dallas. “I had criticized other (prosecutors) in the same situation, and it would have been pretty hypocritical of me not to do what I expected them to do,” he recalled.

So despite the urging of other prosecutors to stay, he resigned. “I felt like I needed to do it for my own integrity and the integrity of the office,” he said. Yet today, after working for a few years in private practice, he’s back working as an assistant prosecutor, in Wise County outside of Dallas.

Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg, who pleaded guilty to DWI on Friday and was sentenced to 45 days in jail, has insisted she has no intention of quitting. Friends and colleagues say part of the reason is personal. A driven career prosecutor who ascended to the top job in 2008 after working three decades behind the scenes, her county work has been her life.

Politics are also a factor. While an obscure Texas statute allows prosecutors to be removed from office for drinking, it’s rarely invoked, although a local lawyer has filed such a petition under the law. State law calls for the governor to name a replacement for a vacated DA’s office. Rick Perry almost certainly would appoint a fellow Republican, dealing an insulting political blow to Travis County, which votes Democratic.

It’s still unclear whether Lehmberg can survive professionally. Other Texas public officials convicted of drunken driving haven’t spent stretches of time in jail. The Travis County position is also especially high profile because it includes the state’s public integrity unit, which prosecutes Texas public officials accused of misdeeds in office. And jail records described Lehmberg as uncooperative toward police and correctional workers after her arrest, details that could ratchet up public pressure for her to resign.

Cole’s professional trajectory also highlights the complicated calculus that must be performed when a law enforcement official sworn to uphold the law is caught breaking it. Elected officials, in particular, who are under no legal obligation to quit, must weigh their ambition and competence against a critical public perception that can erode the effectiveness of their work.

There is no clear course. An American-Statesman analysis shows that, unlike Cole, other district attorneys, as well as judges and elected officials, have chosen to remain in office after their DWIs.

I had wondered about this, so I’m glad to see the Statesman address the question. Besides Cole, there were two other DAs arrested for DUI – these were all in the last ten years or so; I suspect there would be more if the Statesman had looked farther back, but the value of each example would decline over time – and neither resigned, but both were eventually defeated for re-election. No District Court judges stepped down after being busted. This all strongly suggests to me that Lehmberg will stick to her original plan to not resign. It’s possible that the complaint under that obscure law about drunk DAs could eventually force her out, but color me skeptical in the absence of any precedents for that. I suspect the force that will ultimately determine if she stays or goes is pressure from the Travis County Democratic establishment. If they have her back, she’ll probably be fine. If they decide she’s more trouble than she’s worth, out she’ll go. Watch what is or isn’t being said in public, and that should tell you what you need to know.

That’ll just about do it for gambling this session

Apr 23rd, 2013
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Sen. Carona calls the chances “slim”, but it sounds like slim just left town to me.

[Sen. John] Carona, chairman of the Senate’s Business and Commerce Committee, said last week he expected to vote his sweeping gambling bill out of his committee Tuesday. But the morning committee hearing came and went, and Carona declined to bring the bill up for a vote.

Carona’s fellow senators told him they didn’t want to take a vote on the controversial topic if it doesn’t have much of a chance, especially in the Texas House, Carona said.

State Rep. John Kuempel, R-Seguin, agreed that there is not much of an appetite for gambling in the House this year.

“I don’t think it has a great chance over here,” said Kuempel, who supports expanded gambling to bring additional revenue to Texas. “It’s challenged in the 83rd legislative session in the Texas House.”

[…]

Even if his legislation fails this session, Carona said a lot has been accomplished in the past several weeks. Notably, two often clashing pro-gambling interests — those seeking slot machines at racetracks and those advocating casinos — have worked well together on a broad gambling bill.

“Time is always your enemy in a legislative session,” Carona said, adding that he is not ready to pronounce gambling dead just yet.

Sure sounds dead to me, but as always, you never know. There will almost certainly be a special session to deal with school finance next year, however, and barring anything unexpected from the Supreme Court the Lege will need to find more revenue for the schools, so expect the subject to be on the front burner. Having the cover of a court order sufficed to get the business margins tax created, and it could well do the same for some kind of gambling measure. If nothing else, we’re going to have to pay for Rick Perry’s irresponsible tax cuts somehow. So don’t bury expanded gambling too deeply just yet.

SBOE passes anti-voucher resolution

Apr 23rd, 2013
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Good for them.

The Texas State Board of Education voted 10-5 on Friday to urge the Legislature to reject proposals that would result in public funds being allocated for private educational institutions.

The resolution, authored by Board of Education member Ruben Cortez, Jr., D-Brownsville, asks the legislature to “reject all vouchers, taxpayer savings grants, tax credits, or any other mechanisms that have the effect of reducing funding to public schools.” It mirrored an amendment the House recently passed to the state budget by a wide margin banning the use of public dollars for private schools.

[…]

Though the resolution eventually passed, it initially endured stiff opposition from a number of board members – including some who said the issue was outside of the board’s purview.

Member Tom Maynard, R-Georgetown, while stressing that he was a “huge supporter” of public schools, said that the board should leave the issue to the legislature.

“I get the voucher question all the time. And my position is, this isn’t a matter for the SBoE,” he said. “This resolution puts us in a position of commenting on things that are not within our constitutional authority.”

Maynard moved to postpone the resolution indefinitely, which provoked a debate about the role of the State Board in evaluating education policy. Member Marisa B. Perez, D-San Antonio, argued that the issue was central to the Board’s responsibilities.

“Saying that it doesn’t fall under our guise is not an acceptable answer to the teachers who are asking for our support,” she said. “Siphoning money from our public schools and turning them over to our private schools is definitely something we should address.”

The question about going outside the board’s duties is a valid one. The SBOE doesn’t have budgetary authority, but they do play a role in school finance as the trustees of the Permanent School Fund. I don’t have a problem with them passing a non-binding resolution, but I admit I’d feel differently if they had voted in favor of vouchers. I wonder if they were motivated in part to take this action by getting their noses out of joint over their potential loss of charter school oversight.

Only one of the board members explicitly endorsed the proposals condemned in the resolution – Geraldine “Tincy” Miller, R-Dallas.

“I believe in the American right to educate my children in the manner that I want,” she said. In addition to Miller and Mercer, other board members that voted against the resolution were chairwoman Barbara Cargill, R-The Woodlands, Donna Bahorich, R-Houston, and David Bradley, R-Beaumont.

Yes, of course my SBOE member supported vouchers, even though she once said she wouldn’t. Don’t blame me, I voted for Traci Jensen. Hair Balls has more.

Online voter registration bills advance

Apr 23rd, 2013
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Some good news.

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

House Bill 313, which received praise from committee members in a Monday hearing, and Senate Bill 315, which was voted out of committee Thursday, propose allowing voters to register online and have that application automatically authenticated rather than having to wait on local election officials to reenter the data in their systems and confirm it.

Arizona, which was the first state to create a completely online registration system in 2002, now receives more than 70 percent of its applications digitally, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Rep. Mark Strama, D-Austin, introduced HB 313 with a higher authentication standard than seen in Arizona and other states.

Users would have to prove their identity by providing the last four digits of their social security number, driver’s license number and driver’s license audit number, which is specific to the physical card and would prevent someone from stealing a license to register online.

“That is such a high threshold of authorization that in Texas law it constitutes notarization,” Strama said.

The Texas Association of Counties reported in the bill’s fiscal note that the proposal would yield considerable savings associated with the expedited process and not having to hire temporary staff to handle an increased influx of paper registrations near deadlines — often increasing the margin of human error.

[…]

A study by the Pew Charitable Trusts noted that in Arizona’s Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, that online registrations cost the state three cents to offer and process while paper applications cost 83 cents.

Albert Cheng, manager of voter registration for Harris County tax-assessor collector’s office, initially listed himself on the witness list as opposing the bill, but said he would support the bill if the author would work with him to address some concerns about security and voter identification.

SB315 is by Sen. Carlos Uresti, and it was approved 7-0 by the Senate State Affairs Committee. As noted, the bills would save counties money while making it easier to register voters in a way that also helped avoid the kind of basic, fixable errors that can lead to registration forms being summarily rejected by some registrars – you know, like what we’ve seen the past few years in Harris County. Like many other things, filling out a voter registration form is something that could easily be done on a smartphone if only the law would allow it. Well, these bills could be that law. I can’t think of any good reason to oppose them. Texpatriate has more, while Texas Redistricting recaps the action in the Elections Committee.