Even Liberals Think The Indictment Of Rick Perry Looks Weak

Although some Democrats are calling for Texas. Gov Rick Perry's (R) resignation after he was indicted by a grand jury on Friday, a number of left-leaning observers immediately panned the allegations as unimpressive.

Perry, an expected presidential candidate in 2016, is accused of "abuse of official capacity" and "coercion of [a] public servant" by publicly threatening to zero out a state prosecutor's funding and then actually doing it. Several pundits, including Vox's Matt Yglesias and New York magazine's Jonathan Chait, wrote on Twitter they couldn't see what the big deal was.

"Hard for me to imagine these Rick Perry charges sticking," Yglesias wrote, adding, "Does anyone think this Perry indictment makes sense?"

"My *very* preliminary reaction to the Rick Perry news: I don't understand what law he broke," Chait opined.

ThinkProgress, the liberal-oriented news site, reported that Perry's own attorneys "may have a point" when they argued his veto of the prosecutor funding "was made in accordance with the veto authority afforded to every governor under the Texas Constitution."

"The Texas Constitution gives the governor discretion to decide when to sign and when to veto a bill, as well as discretion to veto individual line-items in an appropriation bill. Though the state legislature probably could limit this veto power in extreme cases - if a state governor literally sold his veto to wealthy interest groups, for example, the legislature could almost certainly make that a crime - a law that cuts too deep into the governor's veto power raises serious separation of powers concerns," ThinkProgress wrote. "Such laws would rework the balance of power between the executive and the legislature established by the state constitution, and they would almost certainly be unconstitutional."

The Lawyers, Guns & Money blog appeared to agree.

"I'm as contemptuous of Perry as anyone, but this seems really thin," the site said in a post reacting to the indictment. "To the extent that the statute reaches Perry's behavior, itself kind of a stretch, it's hard to see how the statute is consistent with the separation of powers established by the state constitution."

But not all Perry critics were skeptical of the indictment against the governor. Indeed, some of the leading voices in Texas Democratic politics called for his resignation, according to KXAN News.

"We call on Governor Perry to immediately step down from office," Gilberto Hinojosa, president of the Texas Democratic Party, said. "Texans deserve real leadership and this is unbecoming of our governor."