Rep. Jonathan Stickland
The Texas Rangers will investigate allegations that witnesses were improperly registered to testify last week on a bill banning red light cameras at a House Transportation Committee hearing.
The House General Investigating and Ethics Committee voted Thursday evening to refer the investigation to the Rangers, a division of the Texas Department of Public Safety. Last week, the committee’s chairman, state Rep. John Kuempel, R-Seguin, announced plans to look into the situation.
“The integrity of our committee process depends on reliable and accurate witness information,” Kuempel said Thursday evening.
[…]
After meeting for about two hours in executive session Thursday, Kuempel made a motion for the Texas Rangers to investigate the allegations involving improper witness submissions at the Transportation Committee hearing and report back to the General Investigating and Ethics Committee. The committee approved the motion.
The move represents the latest effort by lawmakers to give the Texas Rangers more authority into investigating allegations of impropriety in state government. The Legislature has also considered a proposal this session to move the state’s public integrity unit, which investigates public corruption cases, from the Travis County district attorney’s office to the Texas Rangers.
See here and here for the background. As noted before, this could be a violation of the law as well as a violation of House rules, hence the Rangers’ involvement. As with their involvement in L’Affaire Paxton, this will be an interesting test of the new “keep the Travis County DA out of it” procedures, though I’d have to assume that if they turn up evidence of something prosecutable they’d turn it over to the Travis County DA, since the crime in question certainly occurred there. But who knows?
Of course, this could also turn out to be a bunch of sound and fury. RG Ratcliffe has an interesting aside in a post comparing the styles and successes of Stickland and fellow “constitutional conservative” David Simpson.
(I have seen a witness testify from the London airport via Skype. Several lobbyists told me they register for or against a bill but aren’t in committee when it comes up. Although someone has to be in the Capitol complex to register over the Internet, I’m told it is possible to register merely by pulling into the driveway of the John H. Reagan Building. The House may have more problems with its electronic witness registration than just Stickland’s bill.)
Make of that what you will. You can see video of the critical exchange between Stickland and Pickett, where the latter calls a couple of the witnesses to verify their whereabouts, at TrailBlazers, and you can read a transcript of it on the Trib. The whole thing is bizarre, no question about it, but how much more than that is the key question. At a guess, I’d say Stickland is in line for some kind of slap on the wrist from his House colleagues, but I’ll be surprised if it goes beyond that.