Daily News Roundup, 11/7/07: Yesterday Was Election Day

So, as you may have heard, yesterday was the 2007 Texas constitutional amendment election. Turnout was low, even for an off-year election. Unofficial results show about 1 million people voting on the amendments, every one of which passed (with turnout numbers seeing one major exception — I should probably use the word "discrepancy" — which we'll have to cover in a separate story — EDIT: no separate story; the error is in the Secretary of State's numbers for Proposition 9; the "for" totals are overstated by 550,000 votes, due to what looks like a clerical error in the Tarrant County numbers); turnout for a constitutional amendment election hasn't been that low since 2001. (By comparison, the 2005 election had approximately double the turnout.)

Houston Mayor Bill White was re-elected with 86% of the vote, leading a Houston-area Republican clobbering that saw Republicans lose all their at-large seats in City Council as well as the passage of both the Houston and Cypress-Fairbanks ISD school bond packages. (School bonds did well across the state, in fact.)

Dallas didn't fare as well, as it saw Proposition 1, which sought to block the building of the Trinity toll road, fail yesterday. And in the closely-watched race for Anna Mowery's vacated seat in House District 97, Democrat Dan Barrett led the pack in voting to make it into a runoff election with Republican Mark Shelton.

All this election excitement makes me wish it'd been a less eventful news day. Tuesdays aren't supposed to be that hectic, right?

Let's start with national news: 2007 is now officially the deadliest year the Iraq conflict has seen for American soldiers. The announcement of six deaths in roadside bombings yesterday brought the death toll to 853. The previous record of 850 was set in 2004. And no, the year's not done yet. Our prayers go out to all the families that have suffered as a result of the bravery and loyalty of their loved ones that were sent by the Bush administration into a needless, causeless conflict without any clear end in sight.

John Conyers gave the White House a final deadline for access to the documents and testimony that they've been requesting for the investigation over last year's attorney firing scandal, as his committee filed a formal contempt report with the House clerk yesterday. Democratic aides stated that if the administration doesn't comply by Friday, formal contempt charges could be voted on as early as next week.

The House and Senate finished up the Defense Department appropriations bill yesterday, and I'm sure President Bush, in the spirit of fiscal conservatism that he's been trying to show with these appropriations bills by vetoing any bill with "unnecessary spending," will be thrilled. After all, the $196 billion that he requested for Iraq and Afghanistan has been cut to $50 billion, just enough to fund armor on vehicles and other troop safety equipment without being enough to continue the conflict itself. The remaining amount requested will probably make its way to Bush eventually, but that bill will also contain troop withdrawal language that the administration has been strongly against, notwithstanding what the American people think. There is also talk that these pushes are just the head of a renewed Iraq plan from Democratic congressional leaders.

These bills will be coming up shortly after the issue of the recently vetoed water resources bill is resolved — Bush was warned ahead of time by House and Senate GOP leaders that a veto on the bill would be overriden, but he's never been one to listen, and now it's looking like this may be the first successful veto override of the session and a significant chink in the White House's armor. The veto has already been overriden in the House, and the Senate will be voting on it this week — possibly as early as today.

And signaling more trouble for Mukasey after his confirmation cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee recently, he took a clobbering from a number of Senate Democrats in hearings yesterday for his lack of a stand on whether waterboarding is actually torture, only going as far as saying that he'd enforce any decisions Congress made on determinations of torture. Senators were quick to point out the flaws in that mentality:

“If we ban waterboarding, do we next have to ban thumb screws?” Reid told reporters Tuesday. “Or next do we have to ban whatever other sordid torture you can come up with?”

Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) called Mukasey’s assurances “perhaps the most stunning and hollow promise reportedly made by a nominee for attorney general in my 45 years in the Senate.”

“We are supposed to find comfort in the representation by a nominee to the highest law enforcement office in the country that he will, in fact, enforce the laws that we pass in the future? Can our standards really have sunk so low?” said Kennedy, who has authored a measure that would outlaw waterboarding.

To close the roundup both with some local news and some good news, the state Court of Criminal Appeals is scrambling to distance itself from presiding judge Sharon Keller's remarkably bad judgment in denying the appeal of a death row inmate based on an earlier U.S. Supreme Court decision on the day of his execution. The court will now accept emergency pleadings by email for death penalty cases and other "extraordinary" matters, a move that pulls the court of last resort for criminal disputes in Texas more in line with what the rest of the country's state courts have been doing for a while now. This is another slap in the face to Judge Keller, who received criticism across the state and the nation for her decision, and even from members on her own court, who were not consulted on the decision. The policy change doesn't exactly put us on the cutting edge of rights of the accused, but it is, at the least, a valuable assurance of due process in a state that often doesn't seem to put much stock in the Fifth Amendment.