The Texas Observer

The first day of the Texas Republican presidential straw poll in Fort Worth had the feel of an accountants’ convention. The protesters haven’t shown up yet, and apparently neither have many of the delegates. Party officials say they expect 2,000 voting delegates, and 3,000 attendees altogether (guests of delegates can attend for a reduced price). Maybe that many will show, but the halls of the Fort Worth Convention Center were quiet and mostly deserted this evening.

Talk show host Hugh Hewitt, broadcasting his show live from a ballroom here, had an audience of mostly empty chairs. Roughly 700 guests turned out in their Republican red for tonight’s banquet barbecue dinner. While delegates ate, presidential candidates Duncan Hunter and John Cox worked reporters in the back of the room in hopes of ginning up some positive press attention — scratch that — any press attention.

Hunter, a Republican congressman from California, you may have heard of. He’s made immigration the central issue of his campaign. He helped pass legislation through Congress allowing a border fence. “Everyone here wants that 400-mile border fence that I wrote into the law,” he told reporters at the banquet. “I’ve gotten a good response. The activists are excited.” He dismissed talk that some of the GOP’s harsher immigration proposals are alienating Latinos. “The Hispanics community in the U.S. does not support an open border,” he said.

Immigration is undoubtedly a hot topic among the grassroots activists here, but, contrary to Duncan’s rhetoric, more than a few folks are, um, on the fence about a border fence. Cox is skeptical. “Talk about a boondoggle,” he said of the fence. He supports barriers in major urban areas such as Laredo, El Paso and San Diego, but says that erecting a fence along the enitre border is a colossal waste of money. “I don’t want to spend billions building a wall in a desert.”

You’ve probably never heard of Cox. He has been kept out of the GOP presidential debates so far. He’s a businessman and former congressional candidate from Chicago who’s self-financing his own presidential campaign in 20 states. Cox describes himself as the only “true conservative” in the race. He despises the likes of Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, who he says aren’t true conservatives and who the grassroots Republicans are deeply suspicious of. “Election-year conversions are legendary,” he said. Apparently, Cox is also a big Rocky Balboa fan.

The assembled die-hards gave U.S. Sen. John Cornyn a tepid response when he addressed the banquet tonight. In their defense, his speech was supremely dull — full of bland assertions and bereft of specifics. He delivered it like he was giving a tax seminar. He did say that President Bush’s controversial recent comparison of Iraq to Vietnam was “absolutely right…we know unless we get the job done, they will follow us here.” After he said that, the crowd remained silent. In fact, the only true ovation came when he asked the crowd to honor the troops serving in Iraq.

The presidential candidates will get their chance to fire up the troops tomorrow morning.

If the Republican Party organizes a presidential straw poll and no candidates show up, does it actually take place?

We will answer that question for you later today, after the inaugural Texas Republican presidential straw poll gets going in Fort Worth.

And yes, we’re exaggerating slightly. It’s not that no candidates will show up, just not the ones that most pundits believe matter. Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and John McCain all bowed out weeks ago. Earlier this week, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee took a pass as well. That leaves Texas’ own Ron Paul, California Congressman Duncan Hunter, and a few guys most folks have never heard of.

Straw polls are non-binding. They’re traditionally more useful as campaign PR than anything else. Though the missing front runners will undoubtedly receive votes from the gathered GOP faithful, their absence provides an opportunity for the lower-tier candidates to earn some much-needed pub. The poll will only be open to delegates who have attended at least one Republican state or national convention since 2000. Expect those who do come to be hardcore GOPers.

The actual straw poll — slated for Saturday morning — is only part of the allure this weekend. More anti-war protesters may turn up at the Fort Worth Convention Center than GOP delegates. It appears the most passionate from both ends of the spectrum will be converging on Cowtown. We’ll post dispatches from Fort Worth tonight and tomorrow.

Clemency on death row is rare in Texas, so it is rather historic that Gov. Rick Perry today commuted the death sentence of Kenneth Foster. Perry made his move on the heels of a 6-1 vote by the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to recommend the action.

Foster, whose scheduled execution was just hours away, had his sentence commuted to life without parole. That means he will move off death row, and for the first time in 10 years, he can hope to have physical contact with his daughter and wife.

Perry said in a statement the fact that Foster had been tried simultaneously with another capital murder defendant in the same case was a problem. He urged the Legislature to review the law.

Foster’s case has garnered international attention in recent weeks. He was convicted under the “Law of Parties,” which is unique to Texas capital murder cases. The statute allows prosecutors to charge a defendant with capital murder even if that person, like Foster, participated in a crime that resulted in a killing, but didn’t commit the murder.

Foster was driving the car when one of three cohorts robbed and killed Michael LaHood on a San Antonio street in 1996. The man who jurors agreed pulled the trigger was executed for the murder in 2006. The same jury condemned Foster to death.

The issue here, as University of Texas Professor Dana Cloud explains, is guilt by association. Cloud is a member of the Save Kenneth Foster Campaign as well as the Campaign to End the Death Penalty. She said Texas’ application of the Law of Parties in such cases is absurd.

“It was meant to apply to direct conspiracy,” she said Thursday. “It’s a law designed to sweep up whole groups of people. It’s kind of like punishing someone for not being psychic.”

Cloud says it’s an important day for death penalty foes, but added that the fight to get Foster out of jail will continue.

“It’s a historic thing that they decided to do this,” she said, contending it was even more surprising that Perry commuted the sentence, since Perry has presided over more executions than any other governor. She said Foster’s case shows “just how arbitrary and capricious” the system can be in Texas.

But the bottom line for Cloud and for Foster’s attorney Keith Hampton is recognizing the fact that “activism around these cases works.”

For a crowd that has seen loss after loss in the courts and death after death in Huntsville, clemency for Kenneth Foster comes as a rare, invigorating victory.

The editors asked me to do something in the way of an introduction. I must say, I am writing here in The Texas Observer Blog with some trepidation and an almost paralyzing reverence. The Observer has been and continues to be one of the sweet spots of Texas journalism.

My name is Cody Garrett. I was born in San Angelo and grew up in Tyler and Temple. I have been to every corner of this great state, and I have covered Texas politics in print, on the web, and elsewhere for years. I always keep one eye on The Observer — watching with admiration its forays into the blogosphere.

I think what is important is the work I hope to continue — that hard-boiled approach to news and analysis. Let me just announce, I am hereby taking the plunge — and I will do my best to respect the tradition and level of reporting that has gone before.

U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced his resignation this morning (and by “announced,” we mean muttered a few words and left the podium).

After hearing the news, we were feeling rather prescient. Last week, we were the first to engage in unbridled, and mostly unfounded, speculation that Gonzales might be on the way out. We reported that Gonzales had been spotted at the Texas Capitol. We mused that maybe he was there in search of a job or a possible replacement.

We were kidding, of course. At the time, it seemed it would take an act of God — or at least a particularly tawdry sex scandal — for Gonzales to resign.

Last week, we also squinted into the hazy future and speculated who might replace Gonzales. We observed that Nathan Hecht, the embattled Texas Supreme Court justice, seems to have all the qualities for a Bush cabinet official. If Hecht gets the job, we’re going to buy a stack of lotto tickets and move to Vegas to become tarot card readers.

Depriving kids of health care is bad politics. No surprise there. Just look at Republicans in Texas. The GOP-dominated Legislature has found some cruel and ingenious ways to shrink the Children’s Health Insurance Program in recent years. And they have suffered for it at the ballot box.

It’s a history that Republicans in Washington might bear in mind as the Bush administration and Congressional Republicans try the Texas approach to children’s health care.

You can read the background on the White House’s fight against Congressional bills to expand CHIP here. The administration also recently proposed stricter rules for CHIP that mirror the bureaucratic barriers the Texas Legislature placed on the program at the state level.

The administration wants waiting periods before kids can enroll, higher premiums and co-payments, and a requirement that kids go uninsured for a year before joining the program. The Lege tried variations of all three of these. As a result, the Texas program withered, and the political fallout was severe.

Just ask Chet Edwards. In 2004, the Democratic congressman from Waco had no business winning reelection in a redrawn district that was 64 percent Republican. Yet he beat state Rep. Arlene Wohlgemuth, a formidable state legislator, mainly because of Wohlgemuth’s disdain for CHIP. She wrote the bill that cut the program in 2003. (You can read the Observer’s coverage of the race from 2004 here.)

“The CHIP program became the central issue in my campaign, ” Edwards said late last week by phone. “I beat Arlene Wohlgemuth in the most Republican congressional district in America represented by a Democrat because she wrote the law that gutted the CHIP program in Texas.”

Wohlgemuth defended the CHIP cuts in that 2004 campaign with the same spin that some high-profile Republicans are using now: that families who can afford private insurance are dropping their policies to mooch off the government and that limiting CHIP is simply containing government waste. That argument didn’t work so well here.

“The big government issue doesn’t sell because the reality is conservatives should support CHIP,” Edwards said. “It is helping people who are trying to help themselves. It is helping people who have tried their best to stay off welfare and go to work. It helps them from having to decide between going to work and their children’s health care.”

Also, ads about government waste just can’t match the power of kids losing health care. Edwards’ 2004 campaign ran a devastating commercial featuring a single mother whose daughter had lost CHIP coverage in Texas. He credits it with helping to sink Wohlgemuth’s candidacy. (You can watch the ad, courtesy of You Tube, here.)

The ad has lost none of its potency. Edwards said he recently showed the piece to Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the House Democratic Caucus chair. Emanuel was so enamored with it, he played it to wavering Democrats on the eve of the recent U.S. House vote on the CHIP reauthorization bill. “His conclusion was, would you want this kind of ad run against you,” Edwards said. “It had an impact on unifying support.”

As CHIP rolls have declined in Texas, Democrats have gained seven seats in the Texas House. And even some Republicans got the message: last spring, many GOP state lawmakers voted to partially restore CHIP cuts.

When in debt, borrow more. That’s the Willacy way! Not content with just $129 million in prison-related debt, the Willacy County Commissioners Court voted last week to finance its fifth or sixth (who’s really counting?) project. This time it’s a $50.1 million, 1000-bed addition to the privately-run 2000-bed “Tent City” for immigrants. With the new addition, the extremely poor county earns several bragging rights: more jail beds - 4,600 in all - than the country of Finland; the largest immigrant detention camp in the country; and more debt than any rural county in Texas.
(For details on the private prison craze in Raymondville see my October, 2006 story in the Observer.)

Willacy is an economic backwater in South Texas with a near-comically dysfunctional local government. For over a decade area leaders have been trying to dig their way out of the doldrums by building prisons, jails, and detention centers and turning them over to private outfits for management. Raymondville, the county seat that locals are calling “Prisonville,” is host to what’s probably the largest concentration of privatized jail facilities in the world. It’s a great deal for the companies. They assume virtually no risk and get to collect healthy profits.

Meanwhile the county has to worry about paying down its staggering amount of debt, approaching $180 million, or about $8,700 for every man, woman, and child in the county. At times, the government has struggled to make the payments. But instead of putting down the shovel, they just keep digging deeper. It’s the American way! In the case of the 2000-bed immigrant detention center, which was built just last year, the county needed an average of 1,800 detainees to make the $2.6 million in debt payments every month. The Valley Morning Star reports that the number of detainees has hovered around 1,500. It’s not clear how the county is covering its obligations to bondholders. Even less clear is how building another 1,000 beds will improve the situation.

“I look at it as an economic opportunity,” Commissioner Eddie Chapa told the Star. “It’s an opportunity for Willacy County to get additional employment for the citizens of the county and more income to the county.”

The county leaders argue that the jails bring much-needed jobs and secondary economic benefits to the area. In the jobs department, they arguably have met with some success. Unemployment has plummeted from 24.1 percent ten years ago to 8.7 percent today based on Census figures. However, it should be noted that surrounding counties, without prison-based economies, have seen a similar drop in unemployment over the same time period.