Court Writes Delay a Blank Check
By Andrew Wheat / September 19, 2008
Two years after scandal drove Tom DeLay from Congress and six years after DeLay allegedly violated state law to make over Texas’ congressional map, a state appeals court recently hammered out a stunning legal opinion that did all it could—and more than it should—to rescue DeLay and two fellow indicted cronies. Freeing jurisprudence from the shackles of prudence, the ruling is a tour de brute force that is every bit worthy of the man for whom it was written.
Acting on a pretrial appeal by two cronies who helped DeLay run the Texans for a Republican Majority PAC in 2002, three Republican state judges on the Austin-based Third Court of Appeals twisted their August 22 ruling into a would-be DeLay rescue rope. Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle had indicted John Colyandro of Austin and Jim Ellis of Washington, D.C., in 2004 and 2005 on charges that they raised illegal corporate contributions for TRMPAC and illegally laundered $190,000 of the funds though a Republican political committee in Washington. (DeLay faces similar laundering charges.) The appeal that Colyandro and Ellis filed three long years ago argued that the state laws they allegedly broke are unconstitutionally vague.
Rejecting the defendants’ arguments, most of the court’s 22-page opinion belabors the well-established constitutionality of laws that prohibit corporate campaign contributions in Texas. What’s notable is that it took the judges so long—in words and years—to tackle a no-brainer.
Next, the judges address claims that the money-laundering law that Earle invoked is unconstitutionally vague. The GOP judges do their best to spin gold from straw. DeLay, Colyandro, and Ellis all face money-laundering charges for transactions that occurred shortly before the November 2002 election. That’s when TRMPAC sent a $190,000 check to an arm of the Republican National Committee. Two weeks later, the committee sent a total of $190,000 in campaign contributions to seven TRMPAC-backed legislative candidates in Texas. Earle argues that TRMPAC used this financial round-trip to funnel corporate contributions illegally to Texas legislative candidates.
The Austin judges crafted a semantic escape hatch, arguing that the money-laundering law applied to money—but not to TRMPAC’s checks. The law says a person commits a crime when he or she “conducts, supervises, or facilitates a transaction involving the proceeds of criminal activity.” The law defined these “proceeds” as “funds” such as domestic and foreign currency. Since the law did not specifically say that checks are “funds,” the GOP judges wrote that the money-laundering statute does not apply to TRMPAC’s $190,000 check—or the seven smaller checks that it begat.
To support this claim, the judges cite differences between checks and cash—differences that vanish the instant a check is cashed, of course. The opinion notes that checks might not be converted to cash if the signature is forged, the check writer stops payment, or the check bounces. Yet none of these scenarios applies to the eight checks involved in the TRMPAC case. Those checks performed exquisitely as cash. In a defining moment, the judges wrote, “It is too much of a leap for us to conclude that a reasonable person of ordinary intelligence would look at the pre-2005 version of section 34.01 and be aware that it intended to criminalize the ‘laundering’ of checks.” In fact, this is precisely what reasonable, intelligent people would conclude—were they not trying to help fellow party activists beat a criminal rap.
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http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/texas-court-decision-worthy-of-tom.html
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