Remember, it's never the crime...
May. 24th, 2003 11:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
womzillaIt's the cover-up.
The current incarnation of this is the Disappearing Texas Democrats fiasco. For those who came in late, early this month, the entire Democratic membership of the Texas legislature hightailed it from Texas and holed up in a Holiday Inn in Oklahoma for most of a week to prevent the legislature from having a quorum, because the Republican leaders of the legislature, under orders from US House of Representatives Tom "The Hammer" DeLay (R-Malebolgia), were about to redistrict Texas to eliminate as many as five likely Democratic congressional seats.
Leave aside the fact that Texas just redistricted last year in response to the 2000 Census and that redistricting again is a blatant partisan move in violation of a century of US political practice. Leave aside that what the Democrats did was strictly illegal, since it's not actually a crime. (No, really. That's how it's defined in Texas law.)
What the Republicans did in response to this not-criminal activity was order the Texas Department of Public Safety to find the Democrats by any means necessary. This included a DPS officer filing a false report of a missing plane with the FAA to try to get the Department of Homeland Security on the case; it also, accoding to DeLay, involved DeLay asking the FBI to get involved. Then, once it was pointed out that lying to the Dept. of Homeland Security and the FBI was probably criminal behavior, all parties involved started stonewalling, and the DPS ordered all records destroyed.
Joshua Micah Marshall is doing his damnest to keep this story from dying on the back burner of the corporate-owned media. Help him out. Write to your congresspeople about this. Make phone calls. This is a crime, and it needs to be treated as one.
The current incarnation of this is the Disappearing Texas Democrats fiasco. For those who came in late, early this month, the entire Democratic membership of the Texas legislature hightailed it from Texas and holed up in a Holiday Inn in Oklahoma for most of a week to prevent the legislature from having a quorum, because the Republican leaders of the legislature, under orders from US House of Representatives Tom "The Hammer" DeLay (R-Malebolgia), were about to redistrict Texas to eliminate as many as five likely Democratic congressional seats.
Leave aside the fact that Texas just redistricted last year in response to the 2000 Census and that redistricting again is a blatant partisan move in violation of a century of US political practice. Leave aside that what the Democrats did was strictly illegal, since it's not actually a crime. (No, really. That's how it's defined in Texas law.)
What the Republicans did in response to this not-criminal activity was order the Texas Department of Public Safety to find the Democrats by any means necessary. This included a DPS officer filing a false report of a missing plane with the FAA to try to get the Department of Homeland Security on the case; it also, accoding to DeLay, involved DeLay asking the FBI to get involved. Then, once it was pointed out that lying to the Dept. of Homeland Security and the FBI was probably criminal behavior, all parties involved started stonewalling, and the DPS ordered all records destroyed.
Joshua Micah Marshall is doing his damnest to keep this story from dying on the back burner of the corporate-owned media. Help him out. Write to your congresspeople about this. Make phone calls. This is a crime, and it needs to be treated as one.
