He’s a good company man, I’ll give him that much.
Still the only voter ID anyone should need
After being rebuked by Gov. Greg Abbott for the state’s botched review of the voter rolls, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety took “full responsibility” Tuesday for providing data to the secretary of state’s office that included thousands of individuals whose citizenship should never have been in question.
Testifying before the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, Steve McCraw offered a mea culpa for the role his agency played in transmitting flawed data to the secretary of state. That data led state officials to mistakenly challenge the eligibility of almost 25,000 registered voters who had already proved their citizenship status to DPS.
McCraw explained that DPS lacked a “senior-level person in position” at the beginning of the review process, which dates back to last March, to help explain the data to other state officials.
“If we had done that, there never would have been U.S. naturalized citizens known to DPS that was provided to the secretary of state that would have gone out through the election process and caused the problems that is causing right now,” McCraw said.
[…]
“I take full responsibility as the leader of the Department of Public Safety, recognizing there’s some complex issues with our data,” McCraw said. “We’re the experts on our data. If we had a senior person in place, I am confident that that would not have happened. I can assure you of that.”
See here for the background. So when McCraw says he takes “full responsibility” for this, does that include consequences? I mean, David Whitley is probably not going to be SOS for much longer. Is McCraw’s eat-a-crap-sandwich testimony the worst thing that happens to him? It could well be.
Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday seemed to welcome the head of the Department of Public Safety’s acceptance of blame for a botched rollout of a more rigorous, ongoing search by Texas for possible noncitizen voting.
Abbott said he stands 100 percent behind his nomination of Secretary of State David Whitley, who runs the other agency involved in the ill-fated release of error-filled lists of voters, which has drawn scornful criticism from a federal judge.
Abbott, who twice criticized DPS director Steve McCraw in recent weeks, declined to directly answer a question about whether McCraw’s testimony to a Senate panel on Tuesday has appeased the Republican governor.
Abbott, though, said he has not gone over McCraw’s head to complain to the five-member Public Safety Commission, which hired McCraw and could let him go.
“I’ve not talked to anybody on the board,” Abbott said at a news conference at which the music industry’s collector of license fees for songwriters, Broadcast Music Inc., announced it is opening an Austin office.
That’s it? Not even an “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed” speech? As consequences go, that’s not very consequential. Of course, if the SOS keeps screwing up on its own, Steve McCraw’s true confessions may not be enough. Anyone else out there wanna do Greg Abbott a solid?
Charles, any word on whether Whitley’s nomination is ever going to finally be voted on? Why such a long delay? Are they hoping a couple Senate Dems call in sick?
Whitley screwed up big time, then clearly showed that he failed to learn from the screwup. The Senate needs to make an example of him.
When such a vote would come to the floor is pretty much up to Dan Patrick, assuming all 19 Republicans would support it (the three-fifths rule). If at least one Republican Senator is opposed to bringing it to the floor, or if Patrick’s vote count tells him the nomination is doomed (despite Greg Abbott’s cheerleading about flipping a Dem or two), it just won’t get scheduled.
As you note, they may also just wait for an opportunity when a couple of Dems are known to be absent, or turn up absent. If that’s their game, we may not know till it’s right about to happen.