The State of Texas: April 14, 2016

Quote of the Day

Ted Cruz thinks people don't have a right to "stimulate their genitals." I was his college roommate. This would be a new belief of his.

— Craig Mazin (@clmazin) April 13, 2016

—Cruz’s former roomie chimed in on a story Mother Jones ran on Wednesday, recounting Cruz’s crusade against dildos while he was Texas solicitor general. Yes, dildos. During a legal battle more than ten years ago, Cruz, attempting to ban the sale of sex toys in Texas, argued that “there is no substantive-due-process right to stimulate one’s genitals for non-medical purposes unrelated to procreation or outside of an interpersonal relationship.” Seems like a college-aged Cruz would have been caught, um, red-handed.

Daily Roundup

Go Directly to Jail—Ethan Couch could be spending the next 720 days in a prison cell. A district judge in Fort Worth sentenced the so-called “affluenza teen” to four consecutive 180-day jail terms on Wednesday, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported. Couch was convicted of killing four people in a DWI crash in 2013, and initially sentenced to ten years of probation in juvenile court after his attorneys argued that he was just too darned rich and spoiled to understand that it’s a bad thing to get drunk and commit vehicular manslaughter. He fled to Mexico with his mother before being caught again in December last year, so one would imagine a harsher punishment would be appropriate for violating his probation. Couch turned nineteen-years-old on Monday, meaning he’d be handled by the adult court system from now on, and the judge gave him a very rude welcome to grown-up court. “I want you to understand that you’re not going to get out of jail today,” Judge Wayne Salvant told the teen, according to the Dallas Morning News. But the long sentence may not stick if Couch’s attorneys can convince Salvant otherwise before the final ruling on the case in a few weeks. “Nothing I do is in stone, so I might reconsider,” Salvant told Couch, according to the Morning News.

Bad News Bears—Former Baylor football player Shawn Oakman was arrested and charged with sexual assault on Wednesday. According to the affidavit, a woman told police that Oakman assaulted her at his duplex on April 3. Oakman’s arrest less than two weeks later is swift in comparison to Baylor football’s previous sexual assault cases. As news of Oakman’s arrest circulated on Wednesday, ESPN’s Outside The Lines reported that the school ignored a woman’s sexual assault allegation against a pair of Baylor football players for two years. The details of the report are beyond disturbing. In 2013, the woman met football players Tre’von Armstead and Myke Chatman at a party at Oakman’s apartment. Armstead and Chatman went with the woman back to her place, and later that night, her friends called 911 after hearing “a large bang,” “fists hitting noises,” “[the woman] saying, ‘No, no, please stop'” and “‘No, I don’t want it,'” according to OTL. Police officers noted “bruises, a bite mark and scratches.” The woman told OTL that she declined to press charges after Waco police told her she did not have a strong case. According to a police report obtained by OTL, Waco police wrote that they contacted Baylor about the incident in April 2013, and the woman told OTL that police assured her the university would follow up. And they did follow up, but not until fall 2015. Chatman had left school by then, but Armstead was kicked off of the team in September for what coaches said at the time were “team rules violations,” and he was expelled in February. Neither player has been charged with a crime, but it sounds like the Title IX investigations by Baylor were, at best, woefully delayed.

Jesus, Sid—Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller seems to enjoy spending taxpayer money on bizarre things, like pseudoscientific cure-all injections (he reportedly spent more than $1,000 traveling to Oklahoma City to receive an aptly-named “Jesus Shot”) and calf-roping competitions (nearly $2,000 on a trip to Mississippi to participate in a rodeo). Not OK, Sid. Not OK. The Texas Tribune reported on Wednesday that Miller is under investigation by the Texas Rangers for his publicly funded frolics out of state. That same day, a liberal activist group filed an ethics complaint against Miller, prompting him to respond that his accusers are “just harassing me.” In light of the criminal probe, that was maybe not the wisest response for Miller. But it’s easy to understand if his office isn’t firing on all cylinders, considering his top communications officer jumped ship on Tuesday. According to the Houston Chronicle, which broke the stories of Sid’s fateful excursions, Lucy Nashed resigned, saying “there’s a tremendous lack of communication at the [Department of Agriculture], which makes it difficult for me as a (communications) person to do my job.” Speaking of communication, what do Miller’s fellow Texas Republicans have to say about all this? Nada, according to the Associated Press.