So... Rick Perry Indicted...

[Logan Darklighter]

From Business Insider: 

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 former Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod, Clinton and Obama administration alum Jonathan Prince, Vox's Matt Yglesias, and New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait, wrote on Twitter they couldn't see what the big deal was.
"Unless he was demonstrably trying to scrap the ethics unit for other than his stated reason," Axelrod argued, "Perry indictment seems pretty sketchy."
"Have to say Perry indictment seems nuts. Gov has constitutional power to veto. Gov uses power. Grand jury indicts bc they don't like reason?" Prince asked. 
"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."

From The Houston Chronicle:

The media narrative is quickly hardening in Perry's favor. Legal experts and attorneys are telling reporter after reporter that prosecutors face an uphill battle in making the indictment stick. The humiliating video taken shortly after Lehmberg's arrest is on loop on cable news. Pundits who otherwise wouldn't be caught dead supporting Perry are coming to his defense, including David Axelrod, a former top adviser to President Barack Obama, and Harvard Law Prof. Alan Dershowitz. 

Alan Dershowitz - not exactly a fan of Perry is actually coming to his defense in this case as well: 

"Everybody, liberal or conservative, should stand against this indictment," Dershowitz said. "If you don't like how Rick Perry uses his office, don't vote for him."

He went further:

"This is another example of the criminalization of party differences," said Dershowitz, a prominent scholar on United States constitutional law and criminal law. "This idea of an indictment is an extremely dangerous trend in America, whether directed at [former House Majority Leader] Tom DeLay or [former President] Bill Clinton."
Further, Dershowitz said, such indictments are something that's done in totalitarian countries and should not be done in the United States.
In such countries, "if you don't like them, you indict," Dershowitz said. "In America, you vote against them...this should be up to the voters. There is no room in America for abuse of office charges, and this has to stop once and for all. This is a serious problem."
And indicting a politician, rather than fighting back through a ballot box, "is so un-American."

Professor Eugene Volokh thinks this theory is highly suspect:

To begin with, the law applies to a public servant’s misusing property that is in his “custody or possession.” What property was in the governor’s custody or possession? The $7.5 million, if it had been appropriated, would have been in the custody or possession of the district attorney, not the governor.
But, more important, this money was never appropriated, precisely because of the governor’s veto.