By 1993, when Bush first ran for governor of Texas, he wanted a solid lawyer on his staff to handle a politician's delicate personal tasks, including scrutinizing his own past. His first two choices declined, but both mentioned a quiet, deceptively sharp Dallas lawyer: Miers, who just happened to be the first female president of the Texas Bar Association.
Bush had met her briefly, when she was escorted to a Texas political dinner by
Justice Nathan Hecht of the state Supreme Court, a frequent companion then and now. "She got to be pretty close to him in that race since she was dotting all the i's," Hecht said in a recent interview. "In not too long a time, they all realized she was a person to go to for good, sensible advice on all manner of things."
http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/news/local/12811778.htmSupreme Court Heeds Corporate Call: Republican Brethren Where ART Thou?
Donors Who Gave Associated Republicans $2 Million Gave $560,839 To High Court Candidates.Just six days after a Democratic state judge issued a temporary restraining order barring Associated Republicans of Texas (ART) PAC from spendingmore corporate funds until after the November election, the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court unanimously vacated that order this week. The court’s ruling officially reopened the ostensibly illegal corporate electioneering season.
The plaintiffs in the case are two Democratic candidates for the Texas House who cite Texas’ prohibition on corporate political contributions to demand that ART PAC be barred from raising or spending more corporate funds. The case (IN ReNorman F. Newton) aims a double-barrel shotgun at the high court’s perilous claim to impartiality. After all, Texas’ seven sitting justices are all Republican politicians—most of whom have taken campaign money from the same donors who bankroll ART.Over the past decade, ART PAC has given nine successful Texas Supreme Court candidates $38,352. Three current justices who backed ART in the recent ruling walked away with $13,186 of this money. The author of this opinion, Justice Nathan Hecht, is the current court’s top recipient of ART cash. (Current and former justices took $5,900 more from ART’s attorneys at DeLeon Boggins & Icenogle).
http://www.tpj.org/page_view.jsp?pageid=748&pubid=507Ruling for the MachineBorporations, because of their vast treasuries and narrow interests, must not be allowed to unduly influence elections. Legislators made it state and federal law almost a century ago. An average citizen cannot compete with corporate cash. It’s also an affront to stockholders to allow executives to spend shareholder money on partisan politics. The corporate prohibitions are the legacy of the populists. They saw the robber barons corrupt the system. Reform led to the passage of legal safeguards. Now, those safeguards are under attack by the Texas Supreme Court.
Although Texas statute bans giving corporate money to political candidates, it allows corporations, trade associations, and labor unions to create political action committees for themselves. In such cases, they can use corporate money for administrative expenses and hard money for individual voluntary political contributions. “That’s how labor unions and corporations can legitimately have a voice in the process,” explains Craig Holman of the Washington, D.C.-based Public Citizen. “It never means that they can just dole out corporate money to any other PAC.”
It does in Texas. The most notorious example of corporate money raised by a PAC not affiliated with a corporation is Texans for a Republican Majority. TRMPAC spent $600,000 in corporate money in 2002. On September 21, a Travis County grand jury handed down 32 indictments as part of an ongoing investigation into TRMPAC’s actions. Meanwhile, civil suits against TRMPAC and the Texas Association of Business are exposing a GOP machine that fed at least $2.5 million of corporate money into the 2002 Texas elections. (Even the Democratic House PAC accepted a small amount of corporate cash in 2004.)
http://www.texasobserver.org/showArticle.asp?ArticleID=1791Judging PrissyA month after it torpedoed President Bush’s nomination of Mississippi Judge Charles Pickering to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the Senate Judiciary Committee should carefully scrutinize–and then forcefully reject–another Bush pick for the Fifth Circuit: current Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen.
One of the nation’s most conservative appellate courts, the New Orleans-based Fifth Circuit (which covers Texas) gained international notoriety two years ago for its "sleeping-lawyer" ruling. A three-judge panel was unmoved by the fact that Texas death-row inmate Calvin Burdine’s court-appointed attorney had napped during his capital murder trial. To merit a new trial, the court ruled that Burdine had to show that the naps occurred during crucial portions of the trial.
Now comes Bush nominee Priscilla Owen, who–with fellow Justice Nathan Hecht–currently occupies the radical right wing of the conservative Texas Supreme Court. While Pickering’s chief defect was his lack of commitment to civil rights, a thorough Owen vetting will turn up a frightening number of reasons to reject this nominee. Rumors at press time suggest that an Owen hearing is imminent.
http://www.texasobserver.org/showArticle.asp?ArticleID=678old adage: "We are known by the friends we keep."
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