There’s very little daylight between Texas Governor Rick Perry and a large number of fair-minded liberals on the subject of his felony indictment. Not all lawyers agree. But the idea that Perry did nothing wrong by threatening to veto funding for the state’s public integrity office enjoys an impressive bipartisan consensus. Either it wasn’t against the law, or, if it was, then the law is bad.

The key difference is that liberals can discuss it without wandering, as if in fugue state, into a denunciation of illegal immigrants.

Perry made the unlikely connection between the two in his first public comments about the indictment earlier this month.

“I think there are a lot of people on both sides of the aisle, Democrats and Republicans, who have looked at this and understand it to be exactly what we're seeing, a political decision that has been made in Travis County,” Perry said. “I’m going to continue to do my job. I'm going to continue to deal with the big, important issues that are important to the people of the state of Texas and for that matter this country. We have a border that it is not secure because of what the federal government has failed to do. Yesterday I talked to the mother of the border patrol agent who was gunned down in cold blood in front of his family by an individual who has come across this border multiple times, a criminal alien. That mother expects me to do the job and keep the citizens of this state safe, and that is what I am going to do from today until I leave office in January of 2015.”

Then last week, at a Heritage Foundation event in Washington, D.C., he one-upped the Republican members of Congress warning that some of the child migrants flooding the country might be carrying Ebola, by suggesting that ISIS may have infiltrated the country across the southern border thanks (implicitly) to the Obama administration.