THE POLITICAL LIFE OF RONNIE EARLE
Byron York
The Corner
From Texas Monthly's February 2005 issue:
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IN 1993 ANN RICHARDS was governor, Bill Clinton had just been elected president, and Lloyd Bentsen was leaving his U.S. Senate seat in Texas to join Clinton’s Cabinet. Richards’ stunning inability to persuade former San Antonio mayor Henry Cisneros, Comptroller John Sharp, or other Democrats of that stature to accept the Senate appointment foreshadowed the party’s downfall and led to Ronnie’s next debacle. At their home in western Travis County, Twila Earle was reading the paper about the impasse one morning and told Ronnie that he was as qualified and as formidable a candidate as any of those being considered.
“By the time I got out of the shower,” Ronnie told me, “I was feeling positively senatorial.” He called in his chips and made a run for it. Recollections vary on how close he came to being appointed to the Senate; Richards evaded the question when I asked her, making a joke about old age and failing memory. But for a few days in 1993 there was a buzz about Ronnie going to the Senate. Instead, Richards appointed conservative Democrat Bob Krueger, who proved a sitting duck for a GOP up-and-comer like state treasurer Kay Bailey Hutchison.
That same year, after hearing evidence from Ronnie and the Public Integrity Unit, a grand jury indicted Hutchison on allegations of using state employees for personal and campaign tasks and then destroying state files that documented the abuse. Hutchison was outraged by the indictments, as were two political advisers named Karl Rove and Karen Hughes. In seeking the Senate appointment from Richards, Ronnie had left himself open for an effective counterspin: The guy didn’t get to be the senator, so he went after Hutchison in a fit of jealousy and spite.
The newly elected senator’s team was led by Texas’s hottest defense lawyer, Dick DeGuerin. Ronnie assigned his first assistant to argue the case, but he broke his customary rule and went to court himself. John Onion, a respected judge, voiced doubts during pretrial hearings about the admissibility of evidence the prosecution had built its case on. To the astonishment of courtroom observers, Ronnie abruptly announced that the state was not going to go forward with its prosecution. Thunderstruck, Onion barked some exasperated remarks and declined to let the matter go with the charges merely being dropped—he ordered the jury to acquit her.
Ronnie says that the revelations about the innocent men his office and Travis County juries had sent to prison were by far the lowest point of his career. But politically, the Hutchison fiasco is the albatross he hung around his own neck. “The greenest lawyer from Podunk knows not to do what Ronnie did,” said the lawyer who had observed the Mattox case. “You don’t go into any trial, certainly not one of that magnitude, without a plan B. The judge hadn’t said he was going to bar the evidence Ronnie’s team had accumulated; he said he was going to examine it piece by piece, and he might disallow it. What you do is play it out and see. Maybe you can bring the judge around. Develop a plan B. But an able courtroom prosecutor would never just call it down.”
Lawyers are habitual Monday-morning quarterbacks, and even Ronnie’s Democratic allies in the Travis County courthouse are not inclined to let him forget that episode. One wisecrack has it: “The bad news for Tom DeLay is that he might get indicted. The good news is that he would be prosecuted by Ronnie Earle.”
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