Who will be cast in the role of Rick Perry, the long-playing Texas governor and erstwhile presidential candidate, in the upcoming movie Rosemary (release date TBA)? I’ll tell you at the end of this article who I think should get the part.
Rosemary, of course, is the sequel to Marie, a 1985 film with a star-studded cast (Sissy Spacek, Jeff Daniels, Morgan Freeman) about Marie Ragghianti, a young single mother appointed as head of Tennessee’s parole board by then-governor Ray Blanton because his administration was selling pardons and paroles for cash and it was thought she would be a pliable underling. When she turned whistleblower, Blanton and his henchmen tried to get rid of her. Although it was a box office flop, Marie is also notable for the film appearance of later-U.S.-Senator Fred Thompson, who defended Ragghianti in real life and played himself in the movie.
(Hey! Casting directors! Need a rabbit? Need a rabbit to play Roger Rabbit? Me! Me!)
The plot of Rosemary is similar to Marie’s plot, except Rosemary Lehmberg is a less sympathetic protaganist than Ms. Ragghianti, at least when she’s very drunk. Ms. Lehmberg is the elected and very popular (she got 100% of the vote) district attorney of Travis County, Texas, which includes most of Austin, a major urban area and the state capital.
Actually, she’s not all that popular, and probably got 100% of the votes because no one else ran for the office; and her popularity plummeted after the cops found her passed out in a car in a church parking lot with a half-empty vodka bottle in her lap. After video surfaced of her jailhouse behavior (she was very drunk in a “mean drunk” sort of way) — which included so much hissing and spitting like an angry cat the cops put her in the restraint chair with the spit mask on — even her own party wanted to get rid of her.
That is, until Rick Perry messed with her. Then, a movie script was born.
Governor Perry demanded that Rosemary Lehmberg resign. On the surface, it seemed like a reasonable request; after all, even her own party, and essentially everyone else in the world, wanted her gone. Except there are three little problems.
Problem one. Lehmberg refused to quit. A civil suit was brought to kick her out, but she won in court, and is still in office.
Problem two. Lehmberg is a Democrat and Perry, a Republican, would appoint her replacement. This might work if Perry agreed to appoint a Democrat or someone recommended by the Travis County Commissioners, who are elected in a county that routinely gives Democratic candidates sixty-percent-plus margins. But Perry refused. The word is (according to Texas Observer) that he wanted Terry Keel, a Perry loyalist and former GOP legislator. Why this is problematical brings us to …
Problem three. Because Travis County hosts the state capital, its D.A. office houses the state’s Public Integrity Unit, which basically investigates and prosecutes political corruption. (Although it’s housed in the Travis County D.A.’s office, and the D.A. supervises its staff, it’s a state agency and its money comes from the state legislature.) In 2005, the PIU sent U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Jerk) to prison on corruption charges, which still pisses off every Republican politician in Texas, and nearly all Texas politicians are Republicans (outside of Austin) so that’s a pretty large crowd. Let’s just say PIU isn’t real popular with the people who run Texas, is virtually the only important state instrumentality they don’t already control, and in the eyes of the Texas GOP, if they couldn’t get control of it then the next best thing is to kill it.
Which is how Rick Perry got himself indicted on serious felony charges that could send him to prison for 99 years just when he was parsing wallpaper sample books with redecorating the White House in Washington D.C. in mind.
Perry should have known better than to mess with Lehmberg, because she had already refused to resign when even her own party was against her. Maybe the restraint chair and spit mask should have given him a clue, too, about who and what he was taking on. Plus the fact Lehmberg is a lawyer (well, yeah, ya gotta be a lawyer to be a D.A.), and we all know what lawyers are like. Maybe someone should have explained to Perry why no one wants to marry lawyers except other lawyers.
But Perry didn’t know better, because he’s a stupid man, as we all saw in the 2012 presidential primary debates.
So Perry told Lehmberg to resign or else. This isn’t unusual in politics, it’s simply garden-variety hardball politics, everybody does it, and it wouldn’t have been a problem in and of itself. The “or else” became a problem when Perry threatened to line item veto PIU’s state appropriation if Lehmberg didn’t quit, and then carried out the threat when she still refused to resign.
For some funny reason, that’s a crime in Texas.
What happened next goes something like this. First, the Travis County Commissioners (who, remember, run the county where all of Texas’s identified Democratic voters were gerrymandered into a Democratic ghetto after being rounded up by the Republican legislature) came up with several million county dollars to keep a stripped-down PIU in business. This is very bad for corrupt Republicans.
Second, Travis County Democrats rallied behind their embattled D.A. despite their misgivings about, let’s call them, her personal issues because they don’t want a Perry crony running PIU, which is investigating other Perry cronies for political corruption involving the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, a state agency that allegedly functions as a conduit to funnel taxpayer money into the coffers of the Texas GOP (we’re talking millions here). This is also very bad for corrupt Republicans.
Third, a guy named Craig L. McDonald, who is the director of an Austin-based watchdog group called Texans For Public Justice, filed a formal complaint with the Travis County D.A. (somebody named Rosemary Lehmberg) alleging that Governor Perry’s line item veto of PIU’s budget violated Title 8 of the Texas Penal Code, Offenses Against Public Administration “and against the peace and dignity” of the state, and “very likely” violated Texas Penal Code Section 36.03, Coercion Of A Public Servant Or Voter, and Section 36.02, Bribery, and Section 39.o2, Abuse Of Official Capacity, and Section 39.o3, Official Oppression. (For some funny reason, such behavior is illegal in Texas.) You can see the actual complaint here:
http://info.tpj.org/press_releases/pdf/Threatcomplaint.coxescamilla.pdf
A judge evidently found merit to the complaint and appointed a special prosecutor. The special prosecutor is Michael McCrum, a lawyer with a reputation as a straight shooter who was seriously considered for a U.S. Attorney appointment with the backing of Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat who represents the Democratic ghetto of Austin in Congress, and both of Texas’s Republican (naturally) U.S. Senators. McCrum convened a grand jury, probably composed of Democratic voters because that’s what everyone in the Democratic ghetto of Austin is, and the grand jury indicted Governor Perry.
Perry, smelling trouble (” — this could be serious! — “), lawyered up with a big-time criminal and DUI defense attorney named David Botsford. He’s expensive, but that doesn’t bother Perry, because taxpayers are paying for it. Botsford immediately issued a statement to the media denouncing the indictment as “political” and warning it set a “dangerous precedent” because the grand jury was punishing the governor for exercising his constitutional authority. This is a circular argument, because all abuse of authority crimes involve a public official exercising his authority; it’s how he exercised his authority that’s at issue. The argument is nonsense, because taken at face value, it means no abuse of authority crime can be prosecuted. Botsford certainly knows this, and keep in mind that he said this to the press for public consumption, not to a judge as a legal strategy for keeping his client out of jail. Botsford isn’t so stupid he would say something like this in a courtroom.
I’ve been asked by a friend (the owner of this blog) to assess whether Governor Perry is in real legal trouble, because he knows I’m a lawyer. I’m not an expert in Texas law, but I don’t have to be; the fact Perry hired Austin’s top DUI defense attorney and is paying him with taxpayer dimes tells me everything I need to know. I need to digress briefly to explain something. All the top defense talent is in the DUI bar, because that’s where the money is. Few lawyers get rich defending people who chop their mothers into pieces and put the pieces in suitcases and leave the suitcases in bus stations; there’s no money in it, because people that crazy normally don’t have much money; nor is such work glamorous (who wants clients like that?); nor does it lead to political office. The really smart lawyers defend drunk CEOs, drunk bankers, and drunk members of the Federal Reserve. You think all those people aren’t drunk? Look at what happened to our economy, then tell me they weren’t bombed. (Beginning DUI lawyers get drunk housewives to practice on until they get some experience.) So, yeah, I think we’ve got a movie here.
As for casting, Sissy Spacek is the obvious choice to play Rosemary Lehmberg. She has experience in this type of role, and she even looks like Lehmberg, now that she’s older and has lines in her face and bags under her eyes, plus you can perform miracles with makeup. In keeping with the Fred Thompson tradition, David Botsford should play David Botsford, all the more so because Raymond Burr is dead and we don’t want to give this script a Perry Mason ending anyway. This is a serious movie for a serious audience, and thinking people would rather have Rick Perry in prison than in the White House, so we want it to end with Perry being frog-marched into the Huntsville Maximum Security Unit where they execute innocent people (just kidding).
Creating a character for Morgan Freeman should be easy; maybe he can play a county commissioner voting to take money from libraries and give it to PIU. Nobody cares if he gets a minor part; certainly not him, because he gets paid the same anyway; and not the producers, even though Freeman doesn’t come cheap, because even a cameo appearance by Freeman is worth at least $10 million at the box office. Maybe $20 million. He’s so good it makes your teeth hurt. Finally, the big question …
Who will play Rick Perry in the movie?
This is tricky, because it’s incredibly difficult to imitate that stupid look on Perry’s face; even the makeup artists for Dawn of the Planet of the
Apes would struggle with it. And what actor could replicate Governor Perry’s dunderheaded debate performance? Even Morgan Freeman, as talented as he is, can’t convincingly play Rick Perry. There’s only one solution, and it’s the obvious one, the director should cast Rick Perry as Rick Perry. Rick Perry is unique; no one else can play him. He’s one of a kind.