The biggest problem with fall guys comes when they fall on you, as Texas Governor Greg Abbott is discovering at the moment. Not long ago, David Whitley, whom Abbott had appointed to be secretary of state in Texas, resigned after getting caught in a naked attempt to purge inconvenient voters, most of them inconvenient brown and black voters, from the state's rolls. Abbott, it seemed, had made a clean getaway.

Not so much. From some terrific digging by Guillermo Contreras of the San Antonio Express-News, via the Dallas Observer:

According to emails made public Tuesday and first brought to light by San Antonio Express-News reporter Guillermo Contreras, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott pushed for an investigation of potential noncitizens voting in mass numbers in Texas during the summer of 2018. The emails document 46 pages of back-and-forth between the Texas Secretary of State's Office, the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Abbott's office about how the now-infamous list of Texas registered voters who might not be citizens could be compiled.

“The Governor is interested in getting this information as soon as possible,” wrote Amanda Arriaga, the director of the DPS' driver's license division in an Aug. 27 email. Later the same day, another DPS official, John Crawford, indicated that compiling the data was a priority for the governor. “We delivered this information earlier in the year, and we have an urgent request from the Governor’s Office to do it again,” Crawford wrote.

The effort threw some 95,000 Texans off the voting rolls, and its data was almost instantly debunked by nearly every newspaper in Texas. The blame fell hard of Whitley, who struggled to hand it off to the Texas Department of Public Safety. To be sure, Whitley wasn't the most fiery jalapeno in the bowl.

Rather than taking responsibility for his screw-up, Whitley blamed the Texas Department of Public Safety, the agency from which he'd obtained the data he used to compile his list. When Dallas state Sen. Royce West asked the secretary of state about potential voter suppression, Whitley was evasive. "Are you familiar with the concept of voter suppression?" West asked Whitley. "Anecdotally, I've heard voter suppression talked about," Whitley replied.

Upon further questioning from West, Whitley refused to say how he defined voter suppression, telling the long-serving senator that it was irrelevant. "You're the secretary of state, sir, and it's relevant to whether I'm going to vote for your confirmation," West shot back. Whitley never answered the question. "I think ensuring accurate voter rolls actually encourages participation," Whitley said, after telling West that "anecdotally" he's heard that voter suppression discourages people from voting.

Now we learn, and I guess it's not exactly a shock, that the governor was the one goosing Whitley to come up with as many names to be purged as possible. The emails emerged from the discovery process—and we love the discovery process—in a batch of lawsuits aimed at reversing the results of the purge. (Eventually, a settlement was reached whereby Texas agreed not to use the phony list and the state ended up paying various plaintiffs a total of $450,000.) The lawsuits also established that the stink of this particular fish began at its head.

"CLC released these public documents received during litigation in the interest of transparency. One of the things these documents show is that as early as August 2018, the Governor's office was prioritizing the botched voter purge program that ended with our settlement this spring," said Mark Gaber, director of trial litigation at the Campaign Legal Center...

Abbott threw out the first pitch before the Cubs-Rangers game on March 28. Also, he backed a voter purge. Cooper Neill Getty Images

Luis Vera, the national general counsel for the League of United Latin American Citizens, which helped the Campaign Legal Center argue the case against the attempted purge in court, said the emails show how deeply the governor was involved in the process. “The bottom line is this was the governor’s program,” he told the Express-News' Contreras. “He threw Whitley and the DPS secretary under the bus. All along it was the governor pushing for (the program).”

Voter suppression is the expressed policy of virtually every Republican officeholder, from the president* to the governors to the state legislators down to the nice Republican volunteers who work the polls, as far as I know. The party has given up utterly on reaching voters who, at the moment, don't like the Republicans very much, and with good reason. For all the talk about how Democratic politicians have to connect with all those guys in the Cat hats in Pennsylvania diners, the real story is that, rather than trying clumsily to reach out to skeptical constituencies, as the Democrats have been doing since roughly 1973, the Republicans simply use the power of the state to lock those constituencies out of the process.

In related news, Texas's own Beto O'Rourke released a voting-rights plan on Wednesday. Nice timing, no doubt, but the plan contains one truly terrible idea. From the Texas Tribune:

Arguing that "permanent incumbency" depresses participation, the plan also calls for a constitutional amendment instituting term limits — 12 years for members of both the U.S. House and Senate, as well as 18 years for U.S. Supreme Court justices. The latter is a new position for O'Rourke, who's long supported term limits in Congress.

Term limits on federal officeholders are unconstitutional, and the experience with them at the state level is that you end up with government-by-lobbyist because those people are the only ones with a base of institutional knowledge about how legislatures really work. And they really do circumscribe the will of voters who might actually enjoy having a Ted Kennedy or John McCain working on their behalf. Democrats For Term Limits, Beto? Good lord.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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