10 Worst Things About Rick Perry

Texas Governor Rick Perry speaks during an address to the 39th Conservative Political Action Committee February 9, 2012 in Washington, DC. Perry announced Monday he will not seek re-election next year, while leaving open the prospect of launching a second presidential bid.

With his announcement Monday that he will not seek an unprecedented fourth full term as Governor of Texas, Rick Perry (R) will retire from the office in January 2015. Sadly, he will leave behind a record of right-wing extremism that few could match.

Here are ten of the worst moments from his 13 years as governor and his “ oops” 2012 presidential campaign:

1. He allowed Texas to become the nation’s worst polluter. Texas under Perry has  led the nation in carbon dioxide emissions and is home to  five of the ten worst mercury emitting power plants in the country. Rather than try to do something about this, Perry sued the  federal government to try to avoid complying an  EPA ruling that the state was in violation of the Clean Air Act. A  proud climate change denier, Perry called the 2010 BP oil spill an “ act of God” while speaking at a trade association funded by BP. And his solution to the nation’s economic ills in 2011: more  oil drilling.

2. He executed a likely innocent man and impeded an investigation into the matter. In 2004, Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in Huntsville, Texas after being convicted of arson and the murder of his three children. Despite  significant evidence that arson had not caused the fire (thus exonerating Willingham), Perry refused to grant a stay of execution. Five years after Willingham was executed, a report from a Texas Forensic Science Commission investigator found that the fire could not have been arson. As the commission prepared to hear testimony from the investigator in October 2009, Perry  fired and replaced three of its members, forcing an indefinite delay in the process. With a record of executing  juveniles and mentally disabled, Perry said in a 2011 GOP presidential debate that he had “ never struggled” at all with his decisions to administer the death penalty to more than 230 people.

3. He actively sought to dismantle Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Perry argued that Texas and other states should be able to opt out of federal entitlements like  Medicaid and Social Security — even though such a move would actually cost his own state’s economy billions of dollars. Despite their popularity and success, he called these programs and Medicare “ Ponzi schemes,” and suggested they are actually  unconstitutional.

4. He consistently backed legislation to restrict women’s reproductive rights. Perry has made news in recent weeks for his embarrassing attacks on State Senator Wendy Davis (D) and his efforts to  ram through a likely unconstitutional  bill to shut down the vast majority of Texas clinics that provide abortion. But his attacks on women’s reproductive choice are nothing new; in 2011 he pushed for and  signed “emergency legislation” to require women to have unnecessary sonograms prior to abortions.

5. He demonized LGBT Texans and worked to increase legal discrimination against them. Perry was staunch defender of Texas’ unconstitutional anti-sodomy law which criminalized the private consensual sexual behavior of adults. After the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2003 ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, Perry called ban “appropriate,” and blasted the Court decision as the result of “nine oligarchs in robes.” As a presidential candidate, he ran a  shockingly anti-gay ad, blasting open service by gay and lesbian members of the Armed Services as part of President Obama’s “war on religion.” He  vocally opposed the Boy Scouts of America’s  half-measure allowing openly gay Scouts but not leaders, claiming the tiny step “contradicts generations of tradition in the name of political correctness.” Even in his speech Monday, he proudly boasted that Texas had defended “the sanctity of marriage” by writing discrimination into the state’s constitution.