[A-List] US police state: Texas

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Republicans 'used anti-terror agency' to find political foes

Oliver Burkeman in Washington
Friday May 16, 2003
The Guardian

Fifty-one Texan Democrats who skipped town in the dead of night to defeat a
controversial piece of legislation were tracked down after Republicans
reportedly used a federal anti-terrorism agency, it emerged yesterday.

The group of state representatives were found holed up at a Holiday Inn in
Ardmore, Oklahoma, on Tuesday by Texas Rangers with orders to arrest them.

They fled Austin to prevent the Texan house of representatives from reaching
a quorum in time to vote through a bill which would redraw electoral
boundaries, along with other proposals for spending cuts which they argued
would harm the poor.

The law allows for the arrest of quorum-busting legislators - though they
face no civil or criminal penalties - but it does not apply outside Texas.

Now it has been alleged that the Democrats were only found after the
Republicans asked the air and marine interdiction and coordination centre -
part of the homeland security department - to trace an aircraft belonging to
one representative, Pete Laney.

"We called someone, and they said they were going to track it," the Texas
Republican house leader, Tom Craddick, told a Fort Worth newspaper. "I have
no idea how they tracked it down _ That's how we found them."

Mr Craddick had locked the house of representatives on Monday night,
apparently in an effort to make sure that legislators already inside could
not leave. The members are said to have spent the night in the chamber
playing with toy balls and whistling the national anthem.

Yesterday Democrats accused their foes of using intimidatory tactics. In one
case, police allegedly ques tioned nurses at an intensive care unit where a
lawmaker's prematurely born twins were being cared for. Another said his
wife was trailed for the duration of a 200-mile journey from Austin to
Jacksonville.

Republicans, with no legislating to do, produced a set of playing cards
featuring the missing legislators, mimicking those portraying wanted members
of Saddam's regime.

"These folks are not stupid, they're like members of some weird cult," the
leftwing Texan journalist Molly Ivins wrote of the state's Republicans in
yesterday's Washington Post.

She cited recent comments made by one representative, Debbie Riddle, in a
legislative committee: "Where did this idea come from that everybody
deserves free education? Free medical care? Free whatever? It comes from
Moscow. From Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of hell."