Texas Scorecard by Michael Quinn Sullivan July 2, 2021
A rogue, unethical state agency has threatened my family – and yours – to protect their unconstitutional activities.For almost a decade, a rogue, unethical state agency has been trying to silence me because I work to expose the sewer culture of Austin. I’ve challenged the agency’s legitimacy and exposed their efforts to suppress Texans’ First Amendment rights. And so, in a desperate and patently illegal act, they have chosen to escalate their efforts by threatening my family.
It just makes me want to fight harder.
The agency in question is called the “Texas Ethics Commission.” This agency wages paperwork war on behalf of the establishment. Organized in the state Constitution for the purpose of setting the Legislature’s cushy per diem pay, the “ethics” commission has since grown into a shadowy agency with designs on regulating the political speech of citizens. Even their structure is unconstitutional.
This is an agency that has declared, in public, that “constitutional issues don’t matter” in their hearings. It is an agency that has been named the least transparent in the nation. It is an agency that holds to the idea that due process doesn’t matter. It is an agency that hired a private investigator to follow my wife and kids. It is an agency that has determined they can suck you into a never-ending maw of regulatory harassment because you talk too much about state government, and politicians don’t like what you have to say.
No one challenges them, for fear of being labeled “unethical.”
But I have been fighting back, and winning, for a decade. It all started when two “Republican” lawmakers who are no longer in office filed made-up charges against me and my organization at the urging of a Democrat lobbyist tied to disgraced former House Speaker Joe Straus. They didn’t like the fact that we were exposing the gap between what lawmakers say at home to their constituents and what they actually do in office.
To his credit, then-Attorney General Greg Abbott would have nothing to do with their unethical efforts, so the TEC hired an unethical shyster named Eric Nichols to prosecute me. In a closed-door hearing, commissioners offered to settle their claims against me for $500. I told them they were nuts.
More:
https://texasscorecard.com/commentary/sullivan-a-gun-to-my-head/
