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demmiblue

(36,853 posts) Wed Nov 2, 2016, 09:26 AM Nov 2016

A Republican Governor Is Using His Own Money to Reinstate the Death Penalty

Source: Mother Jones

On May 20, 2015, the Nebraska state Legislature voted to repeal the state's death penalty. When the Republican governor, Pete Ricketts, vetoed the legislation six days later, the Legislature overrode his veto. It was an extraordinary move, making Nebraska the first solidly conservative state in more than 40 years to end the death penalty.

But the victory for death penalty opponents was short-lived. Having failed in his role as governor to protect the death penalty, Ricketts worked to reinstate it in a different capacity: As a man of deep pockets. Ricketts and his billionaire father, Republican megadonor Joe Ricketts, spent $300,000 on an effort to collect enough signatures to put the death penalty question to voters, in the form of a referendum on November 8. The governor donated another $100,000 this fall to fund a campaign to sway voters to reinstate the death penalty.

"It's pretty unusual to have a governor who would lose an initiative through the process then try to reverse that process outside of the role of the governor with his own money," says state Sen. Colby Coash, a conservative Republican and a leader of the anti-death-penalty effort. "Pretty unprecedented."

Ricketts' personal funding of the pro-death-penalty campaign has raised questions about the separation of powers in the state, but also about his political motives. The death penalty is an odd issue for Ricketts to stake so much on because, at least in Nebraska, it's largely symbolic. The state has not carried out an execution in nearly two decades—and critics believe it will not execute anyone in the foreseeable future because the state is unable to obtain the necessary drugs. (Ricketts' administration even tried, but failed, to obtain execution drugs illegally from India.)

It's possible that the governor simply feels passionately about the death penalty, which he has long supported. But Ricketts' critics think he's using the death penalty to achieve a different objective: consolidating his own power. Ricketts, they say, wanted the death penalty on the ballot in November as a wedge issue to unseat lawmakers who have defied him over the past year. If Ricketts plays his cards right, he could enter the last two years of his first term as a much more powerful governor. From there, he could run for the US Senate—for which he ran unsuccessfully in 2006—or even the White House. "Certainly he sees himself with a future," says Paul Landow, a professor at the University of Nebraska-Omaha who specializes in state-level politics. "A national future."