Senator Charles Perry wrote a column last week calling for fairness, proportionality, due process, and consistent standards from an institution he believes has failed to live up to them.
He was talking about the NCAA.
The principles, though, travel. Perry’s argument has merit. NCAA enforcement is slow, inconsistent, and badly out of step with the world college athletics now occupies. Athletes are adults, and they are responsible for their choices. But the sports industry has spent years normalizing gambling, selling it, advertising it, and profiting from it. When that culture reaches the players, the answer cannot simply be selective punishment and institutional hand-wringing. Fairness, proportionality, and timely due process still matter.
What deserves a closer look is who is making the argument, and which principles he is suddenly so attached to.
Perry is a sitting state senator demanding that an outside body honor due process. Demanding timely investigation. Demanding penalties proportional to conduct. Demanding that an enforcement system modernize itself to match the world it operates in.
These are reasonable demands. They are also the exact principles too many public officials decline to apply when constituents or reporters bring them up.
The same legislative branch that wrote the Texas Open Meetings Act and the Public Information Act lives comfortably inside exemptions, carve-outs, and procedural workarounds designed to keep the public out of rooms the public paid for. The enforcement model runs through the Attorney General’s office with limited teeth and timelines longer than most accountability journalism can outlast.
Perry’s “we believe in accountability” press release closing reads a little differently with that in view.
Here is what this looks like closer to home, where this column lives.
When the press flags a city council for a possible Texas Open Meetings Act violation, the standard response is some version of, “This is a technicality, we meant well, move on.” Sometimes that is genuine confusion. Sometimes it is irritation that the public bothered to read the statute. Either way, the vocabulary of due process and proportionality is nowhere to be found. Procedure becomes the thing the press is being unreasonable about, while the officials responsible for following or enforcing the law wait for the public to forget what happened.
When a senator’s hometown program faces enforcement, suddenly process matters. Timing matters. Proportionality matters. The accused are owed fairness. The enforcement body is reactive, inconsistent, and outdated.
Both of those things cannot be true. Either procedural fairness is a serious principle that applies to small councils and large governing bodies alike, or it is a shield people reach for when their side is the one on the receiving end.
You can test this on your own. The next time an elected official invokes “due process” or “fairness” in defense of a position, ask whether they have invoked the same standard when it cut the other way. Ask whether the procedural objection they are raising today would have moved them when they were the ones holding the gavel.
That is not a gotcha, it is just accountability. In the last year alone, two government officials in this paper’s coverage area have responded to apparent violations of public notice and open-government requirements with some version of “I guess we didn’t know that law.” Not “we will look into it.” Not “we will correct it.” Not “thank you for flagging it, the public deserves better.” Just a shrug.
Ignorance of the law is no excuse for citizens. For officials, apparently, it comes with a grace period, workshops, and taxpayer-funded attorneys.
What Document-Driven Accountability Actually Looks Like This column exists to draw a line the modern attention economy is built to blur.
Real accountability is not usually the thing people clap for. It is posted agendas, meeting minutes, recorded votes, statute numbers, Attorney General opinions, and dates that can be checked. It is slow. It is tedious. It rarely trends. It also has the inconvenient habit of holding up.
Performance accountability is much easier. It shows up in press releases, speeches, and op-eds that invoke principle only when the principle favors the speaker. It sounds good. It reads clean. It gives everyone something to nod along with.
Until someone asks whether the same standard applies closer to home.
That is where the difference shows. One kind of accountability lives in records. The other lives in rhetoric. Here is how cleanly the line gets crossed.
During Fisher County’s last budget season, sitting elected officials cited Attorney General Opinion GA-0193 during a public commissioners court meeting to justify cutting another elected official’s budget. The opinion was treated as authoritative.
The same opinion, read in full, addresses Texas Local Government Code § 152.013, including the requirement that commissioners publish notice apprising the public of proposed increases to elected officers’ salaries, expenses, or allowances. Those notice requirements were not being followed by the same officials citing the opinion. This paper documented the discrepancy in its August 15, 2025 edition, in a Publisher’s Note placed under the public notice in question.
When a government official was approached with enough lead time to bring the notice into compliance, the response was, “I guess we just didn’t know.”
Remember what I mentioned earlier. “Ignorance of the law is no excuse” is the standard taught in every law school in America and applied every day in every courtroom in this state. Somehow, when it travels uphill to the people writing and enforcing the rules, it gets quietly set aside.
More recently, the Fisher County Auditor responded, “Well, that’s just an opinion,” when an Attorney General opinion was raised as a measure of the authority held by a public office.
Same phrase. Different officials. Different occasions. The pattern is the point.
See PUBLISHER'S PERSPECTIVE Page 2B An Attorney General opinion is treated as authoritative when it supports the position they want to take. It becomes “just an opinion” when it is used as a measure of the authority they have.
The August 2025 Fisher County Commissioners Court meeting was recorded. The video exists.
Anyone curious enough to look can watch it.
THE STANDARD
Perry’s piece is not without merit, and that bears repeating.
The NCAA does need reform. Athletes do deserve fair process. The gambling industry’s reach into college sports is a real scandal and always has been, and a senator’s attention to it is well placed.
But the principles he is invoking are not his to apply selectively.
They belong to every citizen who has ever stood at a council meeting questioning a potential notice violation and watched the body try to vote anyway. They belong to the taxpayers watching their commissioners court cite an Attorney General opinion one minute and wave one off the next. They belong to anyone who has watched an elected official discover the law only after getting caught breaking it.
Accountability is either a standard or it is a slogan.
The test is whether the principle still matters when it no longer works in your favor.