Why a GOP governor plans to free a murderer | Will Bunch Newsletter

America entered a new phase of mass-shooting mayhem this spring, as governors tasked with comforting anxious citizens now cry over losing close personal friends to gun violence. It happened in Nashville, where family friends of Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee were killed in the Covenant School massacre. Then on Monday, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear wept when a bank-executive pal, along with four others, were murdered by a disgruntled employee. How personal must gun mayhem get before these states finally act?

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📮 I was delighted with the number of reader responses to last week’s question about which looming case poses the biggest threat to Donald Trump. From Sherman Oaks, Calif., Mike Schlesinger wrote: “The documents, for two reasons. 1) Caught red-handed with the goods, not to mention having lied when he said they’d all been returned. 2) Unlike the other three, this one has international repercussions, as there is at least circumstantial evidence that he was selling top secret information to our enemies (or in Putin’s case, giving them as partial payment on the debt). Today’s slogan: Arrestivus for the rest of us!”

This week: How should Democrats respond to the revelations about Justice Clarence Thomas’ luxury gifts from a Texas billionaire? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer.

June 2020 was an especially stressful time for America. In the midst of that year’s COVID-19 lockdowns, protests had erupted from coast to coast over the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd, energizing young people and others on the left, but infuriating conservatives who thought the marches were lawless.

One of the more aggrieved was a 30-year-old active-duty Army sergeant at Texas’ Fort Hood — and part-time Uber driver — named Daniel Perry.

“I might have to kill a few people on my way to work, they are rioting outside my apartment complex,” Perry texted to a friend during that fraught month. It was not a stray comment. Around the same time, in other texts and in social media posts, the sergeant also said “I might have to go to Dallas and shoot looters,” advised folks to “shoot center of mass” in one of several endorsements of violence, and discussed with a friend how he could justify such a shooting as self-defense.

Those fighting words came back to haunt Perry, both on the deadly night of July 25, 2020, and nearly three years later at his murder trial. On that hot summer night three years ago, Perry was working his Uber shift when he spotted a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters in downtown Austin. He drove his car into the crowd, tires screeching — according to eyewitnesses. Protesters surrounded and pounded on the vehicle.

That’s when Perry spotted 28-year-old Garrett Foster — an Army veteran who, like Perry, is white. Foster was pushing his Black, quadruple amputee fiancée Whitney Mitchell in a wheelchair. He was also carrying an AK-47 assault rifle, which — as we all know — is, for better or worse, legal in Texas.

Here’s what is clear: Perry pulled out his own legal firearm and shot Foster three times as the protester approached his car, killing him. Here’s what became the matter of contention at his murder trial: Perry’s initial claim to police that Foster had aimed the AK-47 at him. But that allegation was undercut by eyewitness testimony, by the fact that Foster’s weapon had no bullet in the chamber and the safety lock was on, and even by a subsequent statement Perry himself made to cops: “I believe he was going to aim it at me … I didn’t want to give him a chance to aim at me, you know.”

In Austin’s Travis County, a jury of 12 of Perry’s peers deliberated for a week but on Friday found Perry guilty of murder — while clearing him on a count of aggravated assault — which could put him in prison for life. Case closed, it seemed, in the matter of an anti-leftist vigilante whose claim of self-defense collapsed under courtroom scrutiny.

But that was before higher authorities intervened — Texas’s ultra-conservative Gov. Greg Abbott, and the man that he reports to, apparently: Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson.

Carlson got the ball rolling by covering Perry’s trial as a supposed travesty of justice — a man standing his ground in self-defense against the Black Lives Matter protesters that Fox News has for three years falsely linked to “antifa” while overhyping the scattered fires or looting amid demonstrations that were 93% peaceful. Less than three hours after the verdict, Carlson called it “a legal atrocity” and said he wanted Abbott to come on his show to explain why he wasn’t pardoning the just-convicted murderer.

Abbott didn’t wait until Carlson’s next show, which was Monday night. The Texas governor — under pressure from several right-wing luminaries — including Kyle Rittenhouse, who fatally gunned down two left-wing protesters in 2020, claimed self-defense, and got off — said Saturday he was asking the state Board of Pardons and Paroles to get a recommendation to his desk ASAP with the goal of pardoning Perry in seeming record time.

If you’re thinking this sounds like the actual “legal atrocity” in this matter, you would not be alone. “It is something we usually see many years after conviction,” said Sandra Guerra Thompson, professor at the University of Houston Law Center. Abbott has so far as governor only pardoned a handful of people for low-level, long-ago crimes. Thompson called pardoning a murderer before he could even be sentenced “a dramatic departure.”

That’s a gross understatement.

It’s easy to analyze this case on the micro level as an individual miscarriage of justice, with the ambitious Abbott acting like a petty tyrant yet also responding to the bullying of his party’s right to free a member of their political tribe that murdered somebody from the opposing political tribe. That’s appalling, but there’s a much bigger context.

Abbott’s pardon promise is the loudest and most outrageous salvo in a growing GOP war against Democratic prosecutors in big cities, seeking to delegitimize the criminal justice system in urban areas where Black and brown voters have elected progressive district attorneys. In Austin, a liberal blue oasis in the red sea of Texas, voters went in 2020 for José Garza as Travis County DA.

Garza, who’d run the Workers Defense Project that fought for low-wage employees and who was endorsed by the likes of Sen. Bernie Sanders, won by promising more alternatives to incarceration and other reforms. Since his successful prosecution of Perry, his right-wing critics have called him a “(George) Soros-backed” prosecutor, invoking the liberal billionaire who supports progressive justice reforms and whose name is often an antisemitism “dog whistle.” (A PAC created and largely funded by Soros gave $1 million to Garza’s campaign.)

Texas Republicans don’t see a prosecutor like Garza as legitimate. That’s partly because they don’t think of the urban coalitions of Black and brown voters and young white progressives as “real Americans.” But it’s also because the policies that these voters are supporting when they vote for Garza — less incarceration, undoing wrongful convictions, tackling police brutality, and accountability for the powerful who get away with stuff ... like an Army officer who kills a left-wing protester — are intolerable to Republicans. It’s a threat to what they hold most dear: a system of social control based on militarized policing.

It’s why Republicans impeached Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner over his policies — with no allegations of wrongdoing — here in Pennsylvania. It’s why the House GOP is seeking to force Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg or his aides to testify before Congress to explain why Donald Trump was indicted. It’s why black female prosecutors like St. Louis’ Kim Gardner, who’s tangled frequently with the police union, or Atlanta’s Fani Willis, also probing Trump’s election interference, have been targeted by state lawmakers. It’s why Florida’s authoritarian governor Ron DeSantis flat-out removed the elected state prosecutor in Tampa in a policy clash over abortion.

The list goes on, but the fundamental conflict is usually the same. The house of American liberty is supported by two shaky columns right now — the democratic ideal that every vote counts, and the rule of law, and you cannot have one without the other. Every week, we witness more extreme examples of Republicans battering both columns to preserve their power and protect their tribe. In Tennessee, the GOP was willing to disenfranchise 140,000 voters, and now Texas’ autocratic governor is trashing the jury system. There is no bottom, apparently.

Question: With everything going on in our country, does trying to do the right thing seem quixotic? — Via H.L. @hjr3rd on Twitter

Answer: H.L., I’m answering your question over some more specific ones I received because I think a lot of folks are thinking along the same lines these days. I’m seeing a lot of protesting in high schools — over gun violence, book bans, climate change and more — but not a lot of activism over age 18. Blame the loss of Trump in the White House as a galvanizing force, exhaustion after the marches of 2017-20, and maybe the increasingly geographic nature of our divisions. I know several Philly suburban Democrats who want to go to Nashville to protest gun violence, but do local activists in Tennessee want them? I’d urge the weary to get creative and find new ways to get involved, and not just on Election Day. It’s always the right time to do the right thing.

One issue that I’ve hammered at repeatedly in this space over the last few months is a seemingly abstract one — the lack of a code of ethics for the U.S. Supreme Court, which might govern matters like outside income for their spouses, gifts from wealthy friends who might have an interest in cases, or when justices should recuse themselves over a conflict of interest. But it’s not an abstract question when one looks at the real-world consequences, from multimillion-dollar “dark money” campaigns to confirm and lobby justices, who then vacation and dine at the swank homes of rich people with political agendas, to the lucrative work that the spouses of several justices perform for law firms or advocacy groups with cases before the High Court.

Exhibit A for Supreme Court corruption has been the longest-serving jurist and an anchor of its conservative wing, Justice Clarence Thomas. Experts in judicial ethics have been appalled that Thomas failed to recuse himself from cases involving the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection on Capitol Hill and related matters, even after it was revealed that his wife Ginni Thomas was deeply involved in efforts to overturn President Joe Biden’s election. But that was just the tip of an iceberg headed for the cruise ship of American democracy — exposed last week by investigative journalists at ProPublica. Their report showed that over two decades Thomas benefitted from luxury perks worth at least hundreds of thousands of dollars — possibly millions — from a Texas developer with a right-wing political agenda named Harlan Crow. The billionaire treated Thomas with private jet travel, yacht cruises, and stays at resorts from the Adirondacks to Indonesia. These gifts were never publicly disclosed — a seeming violation of federal law.

If you’ve followed politics for the last 40 years, as I have, then you won’t be shocked by the underwhelming Democrat response on Capitol Hill. On Monday, the party’s majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee sent a sternly worded letter to Chief Justice John Roberts, demanding he launch an in-house probe of the gifts to Thomas. But why? Roberts has already shown, in the failed probe into 2022′s unprecedented leak of the Dobbs anti-abortion ruling, that the court cannot investigate itself. And the chief justice has his own ethical issues, given his wife’s lucrative work for law firms that appear before his bench.

Senate Democrats should immediately launch their own investigation and summon Thomas and Crow to explain, while the Justice Department led by equally wishy-washy Attorney General Merrick Garland should open a separate criminal investigation. Depending on the outcomes, House Democrats should weigh an impeachment vote — which would fail, but put the GOP on the record condoning epic corruption. This is a huge scandal, so let’s treat it like one.

Is there ever a moment when we’re not talking about Bruce Springsteen? The bard of the Jersey Shore has been finding the cutting edge of the American conversation since his breakout in the mid-1970s, and that was certainly true on April 11, 2016, when I published a column entitled: “Bruce does the right thing on LGBT rights ... so why can’t Pa.?” That day, I praised Springsteen’s decision to cancel a Greensboro, N.C., concert to protest that state’s anti-transgender “bathroom bill,” and also noted that Pennsylvania still lagged on LGBTQ rights. It still does, and the right’s war on the transgender community has only intensified. Maybe someday soon we’ll get to that place where we really wanna go and we’ll walk in the sun. But ‘til then ...