Wednesday, February 16, 2005
The Earle of Texas
The March issue of Esquire has a puff piece on Ronnie Earle, the district attorney that has indicted Tom Delay for illegal fund raising activities.
I must admit that I have paid little attention to this issue, but the article was too ridiculous to simply let pass without a word.
As velvet gloved as this article was, it hit right at the heart of the matter, which must've been accidental.
Hell, he thought, everyone knows there's a law in Texas against using corporate contributions in elections. Passed to stop the railroad barons of the Gilded Age from using their wealth to rob local ranchers, that law had stood up for a solid hundred years. And not only did the Republicans succeed spectacularly-sweeping the state and taking control of Texas legislature for the first time in a century, but now they were bragging about it...
Bragging I say!
...So Earle gathered his political-corruption team and started studying the law-and it quickly all seemed clear as mud. According to a 1976 Supreme Court decision called Buckley vs Valeo, money spent on elections is a form of free speech that must be regulated. That means that corporations can spend money on political campaigns as long as they don't practice "express advocacy" by using "magic words" like Elect John Smith or Vote for John Smith. But at that moment the new Mcain-Feingold campaign finance law was going into effect and there were other rulings working their way through the system, like a decision out in California that suggested replacing the magic-words test with a "reasonable person" test-if something looked like a campaign ad and sounded like a campaign ad then it probably was a campaign ad.
So the law was in flux, his team in doubt. "We were reading all these Supreme Court cases," recalls his chief deputy, Rosemary Lehmberg." And that's when people said, Gosh, maybe this is legal.
So it came down to him, Ronnie Earle, and to one man's sense of right and wrong."
Good gravy! So Delay was indicted because of one man's sense of right and wrong?
This must be so, even this very Earle-friendly article makes it clear that the law was not on his side, in 9 out of 10 interpretations of it.
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I must admit that I have paid little attention to this issue, but the article was too ridiculous to simply let pass without a word.
As velvet gloved as this article was, it hit right at the heart of the matter, which must've been accidental.
Hell, he thought, everyone knows there's a law in Texas against using corporate contributions in elections. Passed to stop the railroad barons of the Gilded Age from using their wealth to rob local ranchers, that law had stood up for a solid hundred years. And not only did the Republicans succeed spectacularly-sweeping the state and taking control of Texas legislature for the first time in a century, but now they were bragging about it...
Bragging I say!
...So Earle gathered his political-corruption team and started studying the law-and it quickly all seemed clear as mud. According to a 1976 Supreme Court decision called Buckley vs Valeo, money spent on elections is a form of free speech that must be regulated. That means that corporations can spend money on political campaigns as long as they don't practice "express advocacy" by using "magic words" like Elect John Smith or Vote for John Smith. But at that moment the new Mcain-Feingold campaign finance law was going into effect and there were other rulings working their way through the system, like a decision out in California that suggested replacing the magic-words test with a "reasonable person" test-if something looked like a campaign ad and sounded like a campaign ad then it probably was a campaign ad.
So the law was in flux, his team in doubt. "We were reading all these Supreme Court cases," recalls his chief deputy, Rosemary Lehmberg." And that's when people said, Gosh, maybe this is legal.
So it came down to him, Ronnie Earle, and to one man's sense of right and wrong."
Good gravy! So Delay was indicted because of one man's sense of right and wrong?
This must be so, even this very Earle-friendly article makes it clear that the law was not on his side, in 9 out of 10 interpretations of it.
# posted by Joe Florida @ 12:42 PM 
