I’ve decided I’m more amused by this story than anything else.
Last year, six tea party members in the Houston area promised to make Austin City Council members pay for rebuking Arizona’s new immigration enforcement law, and they used extensive campaign finance complaints as their tool of retribution. The result: $1,500 in small fines for minor infractions.
Five of the seven ethics complaints — one was filed against each member of the council — have ended over the past few months in the equivalent of a plea bargain.
The fines ranged from $100 in the case of Mike Martinez to $500 each for Chris Riley and Sheryl Cole. In those settlements, council members acknowledged technical violations, such as filing a form a few days late. But they maintained that the extensive list of complaints lacked substance. Council offices said they agreed to the fines to get the matters resolved.
[…]
The complaints were filed after the council decided to end all city business with Arizona and limit travel there by city employees. The decision came in response to an Arizona law requiring local and state law enforcement officers to try to determine whether people are in the U.S. legally if there is a “reasonable suspicion” they might not be.
The leader of this little exercise is some yahoo in Conroe who apparently has plenty of time on his hands; he’s also filed a bunch of complaints against legislators, with mostly chump change results, which admittedly is the norm with anything the toothless TEC tackles, though none of the complaints described could be considered anything but minor. If low-level harassment was the goal, I guess they achieved it. Seems to me there ought to be a better way to police these things than to rely on oppo researchers, cranks, and the occasional concerned citizen, but this is the system we have.