Dismissals for Dollars

Byron York has been dogging the heels of Travis County TX D.A. Ronnie Earle since he announced the indictment of Rep. Tom DeLay last week. We've previously reported on Earle's movie deal and the religious zeal with which he has pursued DeLay, and today York discusses the "dismissals for dollars" program that Earle's been running (from The Hill).

As part of the DeLay investigation, in September 2004 Earle indicted eight corporations on charges of making illegal political contributions.

But then he approached several of them with a deal. According to a source close to one of those companies, Sears, Earle offered to drop the charges if Sears agreed to give hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University for the purpose of producing a program designed to educate the public on the evils of corporate contributions.

“They asked for an outrageous amount of money,” one Sears source said last summer — especially since the maximum penalty Sears would have faced had it lost the case would have been $20,000.

But Earle wanted to get his message to the American public. “My concern has been that there needed to be a conversation about the role of corporations in American democracy,” he said a few months ago. “How do you do that? I think it is vitally important to the future of the country that there be a discussion of this concept.”

Sears refused to give money to Stanford, suggesting an alternative program — the same sort of thing — at the University of Texas in Austin. Earle agreed, and Sears turned over $100,000.

The agreement between Sears and Earle says, “The defendant, after discussions with the district attorney, has decided to financially support a nonpartisan, balanced and publicly informative program or series of programs relating to the role of corporations in American democracy.” Sears also acknowledged that corporate contributions “constitute a genuine threat to democracy.”

Three other companies — Cracker Barrel, Questerra and Diversified Collection Services — made similar deals with Earle.

To say this guy's obsessed is to greatly undervalue the word "obsessed". In his mind, corporate political contributions are as evil as murder or rape.

“What’s funny is, the regular run-of-the-mill work of a prosecutor’s office,” he says in the film, “which sounds like a horror story — murder, rape, robbery, burglary, theft, child abuse, these horrible things people do to each other — it’s hard to see the connection between the abuse of the democratic process and dealing crack, for example, or robbing a 7-Eleven, but there is a connection.”

It would be nice if Earle would explain what that is, but he doesn’t. And his words become even more inexplicable when one considers that Texas is one of just 18 states that bar corporate contributions to campaigns (although corporations can contribute to the administration expenses of political action committees). That means 32 states do not have such a ban.

And how does Earle see his role in all of this? Apparently in his mind he's both the legal priest to who penitents go to confess, and the great judge who deals out punishments for those who fail to confess their sins before him:

So is that a crime as serious as murder? Rape? Robbery?

Don’t say that to Earle. His performance in “The Big Buy” sends an ominous warning to anyone who might disagree with his particular vision.

“It’s important that we forgive those who come to us in a spirit of contrition and the desire for forgiveness,” Earle says. “But if they don’t, then God help them.”

As York says, DeLay is fortunate that if he had to be chased by some zealous D.A., it was this D.A. doing the chasing.