Democrat Barbara Ann Radnofsky's run for the Texas attorney general just picked up a head of national steam thanks to an interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that went national. Barbara pointed out whoever was in charge of reviewing proposed constitutional amendments (um, like Greg Abbott, the state's attorney general?) was asleep at the switch when he-they failed to notice that in 2005 marriage was made illegal in Texas.
Keith Olbermann picked it up here as the story went national.
This bodes well for Radnofsky's AG run, to put it mildly, as the Huffington Post, McClatchy, CBS, Queerty, and just about everyone else leaped on this galloping story, gave it free rein, and ran like the wind.
Barbara, a brilliant 27-year trial lawyer who has worked on both sides of the docket, has a first rate legal mind matched only by her speaking skills. As the campaign manager of her '06 senate run, I couldn't stop laughing at the state's response to her careful legal analysis of the amendment. It's not the first time I've seen people tangle with Barbara and come out of the fray looking twice as dumb and three times as confused as when they went in. Abbott's spokesman carefully wiped the big spatter of egg off his face and said that Abbott stands behind the four year-old constitutional amendment, and said the state’s marriage statute does not conflict with it.
Providing neither legal analysis or an explanation of why the words don't mean what they appear to mean, Abbott's right wing flaks then turned their jurisprudential wit on the Texas Constitution. Kelly Shackleford, president of the Liberty Legal Institute in Plano, TX, displayed the legal acumen that makes his organization a global watchword for constitutional interpretation by describing Radnofsky’s claims as "silly." Shackleford followed up this incisive bit of legal reasoning with a shrill holler that there was a "one in a trillion" chance of the law being used to overturn marriage.
So on the one hand you have Radnofsky, who has articulated and analyzed a constitutional statute and come to the conclusion that it bans marriage, and Abbott/Shackleford, whose best defenses are that the amendment is "not silly" and that "no one would actually do what the law plainly says." As other KOS diarists have pointed out, when the amendment is read with its preceding subsection, it potentially outlaws only opposite sex marriage, and legalizes same sex marriage. "Say there, Bill, thissun didn't quite turn out lak we figgered."
The issue has brought Radnofsky's name to the forefront in a year when no other Democrat is seeking the AG seat, and when the Republican Party is in total disarray thanks to the "what dress should I wear" vacillations of Kay Hutchison as she tries to choose between the blue dress of the governor, or the red dress of the senator, or maybe the pink dress of the benign aging prom queen ruler of Texas and the universe.
Hutchison's promise to resign from her senate seat, a vow broken just as quickly as her 2006 campaign vow to serve out her term, has tossed a piano-sized monkey wrench into the plans of Republican ladies-in-waiting, current AG Greg Abbott included. Abbott and a host of other clock punchers who have "served their time" were all poised to move one step up the ladder when Hutchison resigned to run against Governor Rick Perry. It seemed like a popularity contest she was destined to win, until she realized that "the ol' gal ain't whut she oncet was" and that Perry's hair is, like, way prettier than hers.
Now that Texas's most famous cheerleader has decided that the race is not the shoo-in she had hoped for, she's going to try to have her cake and eat it too, all to the dismay and disarray of those below her. Now poor Greg Abbott has to contemplate another four years of doing nothing as AG, or worse, entering the workforce. Ted Cruz, the Republican candidate for AG, is only a candidate if Abbott moves on.
The beneficiary of all this is of course Barbara Radnofsky. She's the only AG candidate actually concerned about the laws of the state, and she's getting national attention for her focus on crucial legal issues. If and when the legal issues in this campaign turn into a knife fight in the mud, you can have "silly" Abbott and "who'd a thunkit" Shackleford. I'll take Barbara Ann.