newsrackblog.com

Hardball politics continues down in Austin, Texas. I hadn’t been following that part of the story on this blog, so I checked by Charles “Off the Kuff” Kuffner to get caught up.

Texas governor Perry called a special session of the Senate to consider a redistricting plan. Under Texas Senate rules, two thirds of the Senators have to agree to consider a bill; on Monday, it developed that there were enough Democrats — and Republican Bill Ratliff, from a rural district that would have been diluted with urban voters — to block the bill. Game over.

Not. Kuffner reports that (1) Governor Perry said he might call another special session, and (2) Texas Republicans began talking about getting around the Senate two-thirds rule. The parliamentary shenanigans would involve keeping a “blocker bill” off the agenda in the next special session. The Houston Chronicle explains:

Under Senate rules, senators are required to debate bills on the floor in the order they get out of committee. Senators typically put a “blocker bill” at the top of the list, forcing lawmakers to get support from two-thirds of the senators if they want to take up another bill first. A blocker bill already is on the agenda this session.

If Perry calls another special session, lawmakers may decide not to put a blocker bill at the top of the list, which could mean that only a majority of senators could be required to support a bill for it to get a Senate floor debate.

Only if there are enough senators in town to have a special session in the first place. The same Houston Chronicle article gets one Senator Armbrister’s (D-Victoria) reaction:

“Any kind of gamesmanship that violates the traditions of the Texas Senate, they won’t have a quorum,” Armbrister said, suggesting that a number of senators would boycott the Senate.

And Armbrister is actually undecided about redistricting.

Ardmore, Oklahoma might be hosting a passel of Texas politicians again pretty soon.

=====

UPDATE, 7/17: This morning Mr. Kuffner posted a great summary of the past week’s events.

Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CT) has requested that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reopen its perfunctory investigation of the role one of its agencies, AMICC, played in the politically motivated hunt for the missing Democratic legislators’ plane. A press release on his Senate website said,

[T]he first effort of the IG’s office “reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the harm done.”

Lieberman expressed disappointment in the failure of the IG’s office to get a key fact straight, to fully understand the seriousness of the abuse committed, and to address the issue of clear wrongdoing by the Texas Department of Public Safety.

The key fact involved was characterizing the DPS call as “typical,” when in fact missing planes comprise a small portion of AMICC’s workload. Lieberman also held up for particular criticism taking AMICC employees’ statements at face value (no matter how credible those employees doubtless generally are), and failing to make any recommendations to make future abuses less likely. The Transportation Department OIG did much better on both counts. Re the DHS’ relaxed view of the incident, Lieberman writes

The IG’s office concluded that because of the relatively small amount of time spent by AMICC personnel on the Texas DPS request, no misdeeds occurred. “…this reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the harm done in this case,” Lieberman wrote. “The core issue here is not how much time…. (was) spent on this matter, but whether it was appropriate for federal officials to use their access to information, their ability to activate local officials, and the weight of federal resources to try to track down a private plane that was not alleged to be involved in any criminal activity nor was in any distress,” said Lieberman. “That is to say, it is a question of the misuse of federal authority.”

Senator Lieberman’s insistence on investigating the Homeland Security and Transportation Department’s roles in the Texas political dispute should be commended. You can contact him via his web site contact page.

It turns out that many Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees were aware they were involved in a Texas political dispute when they helped track a Texas legislator’s plane in May. The Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) investigated the incident at Senator Joe Lieberman’s (D-CT) request, and released a report on Friday.

Before going to excerpts from that report, a comment: this is a far superior report to the Homeland Security “investigation” of related events at AMICC; the OIG interviewed and reinterviewed subjects, particularly one David Balloff, considered the wider ramifications of the story, and presented a number of recommendations for the FAA to tighten up its procedures. With that, excerpts from the OIG letter to Lieberman (Report CC-2003-123):

We found that at least 13 FAA personnel were involved in responding to the various requests for information about N711RD [Texas Representative Laney's plane -- ed.] on May 12, beginning with an FAA office in Oklahoma City, which was contacted by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) around 1:00 p.m. EDT. This FAA unit is responsible for law enforcement liaison agency-wide. According to the FAA employee who received the inquiry, the caller said that over 50 Texas legislators were in hiding and that the Governor of Texas had issued a warrant for their apprehension. [...]

At least two controllers in FAA’s Fort Worth Center were aware of the purpose of the inquiries at the time they were received and processed. A supervisory controller told us he first learned of the search for the absent Texas legislators from local news reports prior to reporting for work on May 12. He advised that later, in fielding the call from DPS, he stated to the DPS officer, “You must be looking for the missing Democrats,” which the officer acknowledged. A second Fort Worth controller related that in contacting an Air Traffic Control facility in Lubbock, pursuant to a call he received from the Department of Homeland Security, the controller with whom he spoke said, “You know who that [plane] belongs to, don’t you? It’s the outgoing Speaker, Laney, Speaker of the House.” [emphases added]

The report adds that the Texas DPS later provided documentation that it arguably* had legal authority to conduct the search, and that some (but not all) of the information provided to the Texas DPS and/or Tom DeLay was publicly available:

Using known internet search engines, we were able to quickly determine the current locations (near real-time, 5-10 minute lag) and destinations of airborne general aviation aircraft, as well as historical aircraft destination data [...]

In our internet searches, we used such search terms as, “Real time tracking of general aviation aircraft” and “How do I find the current location of a general aviation aircraft? ” [links added]

Following up on that, I’ve found services like FlyteComm and FltPlan.com. Even so, there’s an inconvenience cost to such services — finding them, learning how to use them, and getting results — that DeLay, his staff, and the DPS were not willing to pay. Instead they used FAA employees. DeLay’s staff used one Mr. David Balloff in particular.

Mr. Balloff is a bit of a story in his own right within the OIG report. Balloff said in one OIG interview that when he read May 13 newspaper reports about the wider significance of the plane search he’d helped with,

… I just felt like I had been used. . . I don’t do anything for political purposes. . . and I just did not like. . . somebody calling me for political reasons. . . I would never use my office to help somebody out politically, for any political reasons, period.”

Balloff claims he did not ask why DeLay’s office made the request to locate the plane, and that he believed a “safety issue” was involved. But the OIG report leaves the clear impression they’re not so sure, since it took them a while to pry loose information about various occasions when he could and arguably should have informed other FAA staff of his efforts. The OIG report concludes:

While Balloff did not make any statements during our four interviews with him to indicate he intentionally withheld disclosure to his superiors of the request from Rep. DeLay’s staffer, the circumstances outlined above, collectively, are of a nature to foster such an appearance.

Balloff’s position in the FAA — Assistant Administrator for Government and Industry Affairs– makes him a higher-up in the FAA’s liaison office with Congress, state and local officials and industry. At best, Balloff’s rather zealous gophering for DeLay’s staffer may have been intended to curry favor with DeLay’s office. The claim of “safety issues” seems disingenuous; transcripts of Balloff’s phone conversations do not betray an urgent sense of lives at stake (e.g., “I’ve got a meeting at five. I’ll probably call you back around six.”). Some of the FAA staff Balloff contacted clearly reacted to his title and assumed some kind of Congressional investigation was going on — just the reaction Tom DeLay et al were counting on, no doubt.

It will be interesting to see whether any additional details emerge about Balloff’s role. In the meantime, Mr. Balloff will apparently receive “counseling” about sharing unusual requests like DeLay’s with his superiors at the Transportation Department.

The OIG report also identified at least two policy issues related to the FAA’s involvement in the Texas story. First, FAA lacks clear internal guidance about how to process requests from law enforcement and other agencies. Second, the OIG report cites Representative Oberstar and Turner’s concerns about the “homeland security implications” of relatively easy public access to plane flight information.

An AP report (via New York Times) gets Senator Lieberman’s response to the OIG report:

“This report makes clear that the FAA was used to search for a private plane to pursue a partisan political end,” said Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., who requested the investigation. “This strikes me as a clear abuse of the federal government’s resources — and an invasion of privacy — and one that shouldn’t happen again.”

=====

* At the time, the DPS had a State Attorney General statement to rely on. Since then, a Texas judge has ruled (Houston Chronicle report) that Texas law limiting DPS authority superseded Texas Speaker Craddick’s authority to request their help with rounding up missing legislators. Not surprisingly, the Texas Attorney General’s office spokesman says an appeal is possible.

YOUR ROCKY TOP UPDATE, 7/14: Visiting via South Knox Bubba? You might be interested to know Mr. Balloff has Tennessee roots — and not just any old Tennessee roots, either. From his FAA bio: “Balloff was also a three-time elected member to the Tennessee State Republican Executive Committee.” Sing it with me: Good.. old.. Rocky Top! Rocky Top, Tennessee! I’m welling up here, I’m — sniff — so proud.

Given his state GOP background, I’m now assuming he’s pretty partisan, although he should maybe still get the benefit of the doubt about “feeling used.” The FAA bio indicates he has background in aviation policy issues, so he’s not just a case of a political hack getting appointed to the FAA.

UPDATE, 7/15: An anonymous friend warmly defends Mr. Balloff in the first comment about this post, and rightly pins the primary blame on Tom DeLay and his unnamed staffer.

Via a brief Josh Marshall item, I learned on Tuesday that the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released its report on the collaboration of AMICC (Air and Marine Interdiction Coordination Center) with Texas DPS (Department of Public Safety) law enforcement officials in their politically motivated search for a plane belonging to one of the so-called “Killer D’s” — Democratic representatives who had left the state to block a redistricting vote. I downloaded the report, and resolved to look it over myself. So for whatever it’s worth, this is an independent view of the contents, before re-reading Marshall, Kuffner, the Washington Post, or others.

In the first contact between AMICC and the DPS, the DPS caller (likely Texas trooper Wes Crais***) disingenuously inquired,

Got a problem. Hope you can help me out. We had a plane that was supposedly to be going from Ardmore, Oklahoma to Georgetown, Texas. It had state representatives in it, and we cannot find this plane.

So far, so understandable: a plane was missing, possibly crashed. Homeland security and drug interdiction mission or not, lives may have been at stake, and the AMICC officer was immediately helpful.

One of the main questions has always been whether the DHS agency ever became aware or not that the plane in question was not presumed down, and that it was merely participating in some other kind of search, say, a politically motivated hunt that had nothing to do with the agency’s or its department’s purpose.

I think the telephone transcripts provide some indications that AMICC personnel became aware or should have become aware of this relatively soon. A difficulty with these transcripts is that they’re so redacted (i.e., blacked out) that it becomes very hard to tell who’s calling whom. So everywhere I’ve assigned a name to the speaker, it’s a guess on my part, based either on earlier statements in the conversation, the “ping pong” nature of conversations, and/or context. According to the OIG report “Details” section, a single employee handled all the calls. Via references to prior conversations, it appears that the phone transcripts are in chronological order. With that, some of the more interesting exchanges:

(1) DPS call to AMICC, p.10*: [...]

AMICC: Outside of Mineral Wells. And I do have the police authority there going out and looking at the airport to see if XXXX* can find the aircraft there.

DPS : That’s all we want to do is –

AMICC: Yeah.

DPS : No contact being made.

AMICC: Yeah.

DPS : Okay.

AMICC: No contact at this time, you know, we’re just going out there to see. I just want to let you know on the update that we hadn’t forgot about you.

DPS : Great. [...]

(2) AMICC call to Plainview Airport, p.13: [...]

AMICC: And these people up in Oklahoma** they said that these people were like government officials, and they’re trying to find them.

Plainview, Texas: Yeah, I’m kind of familiar with that whole — deal.

AMICC: Okay.

Plainview: It made the paper today.

AMICC: Okay. I don’t know what’s going on. I’m just trying to find the people that’s all. [...]

(3) AMICC call to Texas DPS, p. 21-22:

AMICC: Okay. And this was the city of Ardmore –

DPS : Yeah.

AMICC: — airplane. And did it have — you said it had have [sic] government officials onboard?

DPS : Yeah.

AMICC: Is it just city of Ardmore officials or — [...on behalf of the city of Ardmore: HEY!! -- ed.]

DPS : No U.S. — I mean Texas representatives.

AMICC: Texas?

DPS : Right.

AMICC: Reps?

DPS : Uh-huh. We’re trying to locate, you know, I don’t know — well, we’re trying to do some checking down here on it. Since there was no flight plan and all that we’re — we’re checking some other things. I guess I’m really not at liberty to go too much further than that.

AMICC: Okay.

DPS : Okay.

AMICC: All right. It’s no problem. I can given you XXXXXXXXX, and they can do a search and rescue for you.

DPS : No, that’s okay.

AMICC: Okay.

DPS : We don’t want to go that far.

AMICC: Okay. All right. All right. No problem. They also had a XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX I think, number that I had in the book here for the airport for the hanger [sic] that it should be — [...] (emphases added)

Some comments on each of these conversations:

The Austin Chronicle’s Michael King provides a nice summary of the story thus far, brings it up to date as of about 20 hours ago, and links to the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) web site release of documents it’s willing to publish about what King calls “Great Texas House Democratic Legislator Manhunt.” Among the interesting tidbits in King’s piece:

If you haven’t followed the Texasgate story before, see some of my recent posts (05/28/03, 05/27/03, or 05/24/03), or better yet go visit Josh Marshall. The investigation of abuse of federal law enforcement authority to pursue Texas state legislators took several new turns while I was on vacation:

The Associated Press reported this morning that

…Texas Homeland security coordinator Jay Kimbrough gave Department of Public Safety officers the telephone number to the agency within the federal Homeland Security Department that helped Texas officials track down more than 50 Democrats who fled the state in a political walkout, said Rep. Kevin Bailey, chairman of the House General Investigating Committee.

As Tony Adragna points out, even if Kimbrough merely left the phone number on the desk and walked away, that would constitute “willful blindness,” given that as a legal advisor he should have counseled the DPS officer not to contact the Department of Homeland Security agency AMICC under any circumstances. Adragna concludes there was probably criminal wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, State Representative Lon Burnam is trying to depose four members of the DPS regarding the DPS destruction of documents associated with the quorum-skipper manhunt, which could shed light on what Kimbrough and others did. The Texas Attorney General’s office, though, appears more concerned with getting the whistleblowers than with investigating DPS misconduct, and convinced the judge involved to require Burnam testify about his sources.

The Houston Chronicle (among others) reports that Burnam and the four officers will be deposed about his sources next Monday. Josh Marshall spoke with Burnam, who says he plans to reveal the names of his DPS sources, and believes “they are trying to find out what I know and who I know it from and how they can get to them.”

Meanwhile, I overlooked a media milestone for the story: on May 26, the Washington Post became the first newspaper to use the term “Texasgate,” according to Google. Keep it up, DeLay, Craddick, Kimbrough, all of you! This story would be nothing without you!

=====
EDIT 6/10: Sheesh. I wrote “Berman” twice instead of “Burnam”, took until now to notice that. There’s no Berman in this story, just Lon Burnam.

Earlier this month, Tony Adragna pointed out that New Mexico Democrats attempted to do more or less the same thing Texas Republicans are trying: redraw Congressional districts after a political process and a court order led to the current district boundaries. Adragna notes that the attempt apparently died (”action postponed indefinitely”).

If I’d known about it, I’d have opposed the New Mexico effort, too, barring some extremely compelling reason not to. At any rate, Texas Democrats weren’t therefore compelled to roll over and play dead when the DeLay-Craddick redistricting bill came along.

In an earlier post, Adragna criticized the Democratic quorum-busting ploy, claiming the Democrats could have bottled it up in the Texas Senate. Maybe. What I’ve read is that the Texas Senate Democrats would have had to act with near unanimity to avert the redistricting plan, and that Texas House Democrats thought that was unlikely.

So they left. Under the circumstances — Speaker Craddick, Governor Perry — good for them. Under the circumstances, refusing to provide a quorum seems more like valid civil disobedience than mere lawbreaking to me. The point of having a quorum rule is mainly to protect the absent, not to compel the present to assist in their political suicides.

Tony links to the excellent Center for Voting and Democracy … located right in my home town! They have a ton of interesting articles and web links about things like instant runoff voting, full representation (i.e., proportional representation schemes that avoid the problems of the familiar winner-take-all process), D.C. representation (they punt on how it should happen), redistricting (including state by state roundups) and much, much more.

The basic question is how to arrange for fair redistricting processes. USA Today points out that Iowa and Arizona have both decided to move the process out of the legislature (to “nonpartisan technocrats” and an independent commission). Alternatively, cumulative or instant runoff voting schemes could be implemented that would make it much more difficult to gerrymander a state, since the losing minority in any given district would still have a chance to gain representation.

In the meantime, note that Republicans won their majority in Texas under the very district geography they seek to “improve.” The burden is on them to demonstrate why democracy is best served by artificially enhancing that victory.

Josh Marshall has an item up wondering where the outrage and interest is about Tom DeLay’s role in the Texas redistricting business and the manhunt for Democrats that ensued. He closes with a question:

[The] House Majority Leader was directly and intimately involved in activities that are now the subject of investigations by two cabinet departments and grand jury proceedings in Texas. Yet Washington is still barely paying the matter any attention. How do you explain that?

Marshall figures everyone in the media expects skulduggery and hardball from DeLay, so it isn’t news when it happens, and everyone on Capitol Hill is just plain scared of DeLay — Republicans need the campaign cash he controls, and Democrats are just “sadly cowed.”

That leaves us Democrats off the Hill. But what the heck is the matter with Democrats, and Democratic bloggers? Kevin Drum’s take, for example, was:

Tom DeLay, apparently barely in control of his rage these days, decided to get the feds involved in tracking down those Texas state legislators who fled the state last week. That’s bad, but let’s face it: it’s not really that bad. [...]

Since I don’t like DeLay I guess I think this is all just fine, but even so it’s slightly painful watching yet another of these train wrecks unfold.

The hell it is. It’s bracing and invigorating watching this train wreck unfold. There’s a song in my heart and a smile on my lips watching this train wreck unfold. Trust me, Kevin, there’s nothing like watching former pest control man Tom DeLay scuttle from one explanation to the next, all six legs pumping, to lift the spirits.

Matthew Yglesias gives it one early item, Abuse of Power, good as far as it goes, but his only item since (that I know of) has been kind of bored with it, seemingly because Lieberman is going after it, and Lieberman is boring and all:

As a partisan Democrat it’s my sworn issue to try and hype the Tom DeLay abuse of power story as much as possible (something about a wurlitzer or something) so this is a link to a story about Joe Lieberman calling for an investigation.

WTF? Wurlitzer? What’s that about? I like Yglesias’s blog a lot, but this is just amazingly half-hearted; even if Lieberman isn’t your favorite candidate, give him some real credit and support for getting after this, don’t yawn “ho-hum” because it doesn’t directly benefit Dean or Kerry or Gephardt or whoever you support. A rising tide lifts all ships.

Like it or not, and half the time I don’t, this kind of thing is today’s bread and butter politics. You can do tax spreadsheets six ways from Christmas, debate prescription drug benefits, or muse about foreign policy, but what people care about is trustworthiness and a sense of playing by the rules. Somebody besides me and Joe Lieberman ought to be getting the word out that Tom DeLay is a frightening control freak creep who’s risen to the pinnacle of power, is busy finagling and conniving for more, and is twisting the spirit and letter of the law to get it.

What’s going on may seem trivial, but it isn’t. I remember Florida on the one hand, and all the penny-ante crap the GOP threw at Clinton for eight years, “Travelgate,” for crying out loud, Whitewater, murder innuendoes. If you’re a Democrat and can’t get fired up about some richly deserved non-penny-ante payback, I don’t know what’s the matter with you.

Yes, it is that bad. It’s not trivial, it’s not picky stuff, it’s not Travelgate or Monica. This is deciding how to staff the House of Representatives, our Congress. This is about how we shouldn’t trivialize that process, and shouldn’t let politicians like DeLay and his Texas brethren muck around with federal agencies and state governments they’ve got no business mucking around with. No business whatsoever. This is about setting limits to power, and observing those limits.

This is a power grab on a level with the Florida recount or the Clinton impeachment in the big picture, and is starting to look Watergate-like in the details. It’s being orchestrated right in front of us, by one of the chief nuts, and I don’t understand why all the supposed best and brightest can’t muster up more than a yawn.