March 19, 2007
Bitchslapping Attorney General Greg Abbott
Late in February, Attorney General Greg Abbott eschewed the law for
political grandstanding when he released GA-0519, Abbott's opinion declaring
as felons the good folks at Texas's district and county clerks' offices.
Little did he know such posturing would come back to haunt him so quickly.
Specifically, GA-0519 effectively rewrote a provision in the Public
Information Act to read that all social security numbers are private under
state law. It then went on---in a fit of "creative" lawyering--- to couple
this revision with a reference to an outdated federal law that makes it a
felony to disclose social security numbers. The result of all this activist
judging was a shutdown of Texas clerk offices, which maintain hundreds of
millions of documents, many of which contain said numbers. Open government,
in short, took a break.
People begged and pleaded for "General" Abbott to retract his opinion, when
its many legal flaws were pointed out, and after the opinion's grave
consequences spread plague-like across the state. But Abbot, lacking the
peach fuzz to admit his bad, took the unprecedented step of temporarily
abating his word for the plebes to figure it all out. And we did. Today HB
2061---a law declaring the General wrong wrongity wrong wrong wrong---passed
unanimously out of the Texas Senate and headed to the Governor, bitch
slapping Greg Abbott along the way.
Posted by Daisy at March 19, 2007 05:10 PM
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