For those of you who don't read Attorney Murray Newman's blog, how the hell did you find this? Anyway, he's about the best there is for the uninitiated to read about the nitty gritty going on in the Harris County Criminal Machine. So read it here. He wrote an extremely prescient article about Scapegoating the Judges, and I want to add a few things I know Murray can't say.
For so much time, Republicans enjoyed hegemony in Harris
County. Control by one party is the
unfortunate product of the fact that conservative and liberals are no longer in
both parties, which happened roughly around 1976 in Texas politics.
While the County seat, Houston, is its own home rule
municipality and has always been a liberal city as long as the rest of the big
cities have, the balance of the suburb dwellers who were traditionally more
conservative made sure that every county-wide officer who must sit for election
was elected as a Republican. For years,
the important judicial races were decided in Republican party primaries,
elections which attract far fewer votes than the general election, and which
also tend to attract the most devoted partisans. But these devoted partisans were obviously
ignorant of the candidates they voted for.
A system of mailers skillfully addressed to likely Republican Primary
Voters would endorse the "most conservative Republican" candidates
and if you did not receive the endorsement of these two or three mailers, you
didn't win the primary. And if you
didn't win the primary, you didn't win the general election in November,
because only the Republican stood a chance. Of course the endorsement for "most conservative" really just meant their check cleared.
This system of political mailers was so truly influential
and powerful, that a narrow populist-leaning majority of the Harris County
Republican Party Executive Committee was able to pass a resolution condemning
the practice in the face of opposition from those who were controlling the
Republican party at that time. I'm
referring to the time Jared Woodfill was Chairman.
The effect of this whole pay-to-play system was to make inside baseball in the Harris County Republican
party the center of judicial intrigue.
Judges who were slashing you rudely behind your back and gossiping with
their silly staff would kiss your ass at political meetings. Every one of them wanted to grandstand and
wave the Bible around, and God, they wanted to talk. And talk.
And talk. It was like every
political meeting was taken over by commercials for candidates announcing their
non judicial activism and vague Protestantism - instead of debating policy and operating the
party. Mercifully, the Republican party
no longer has candidates with this disingenuous sleaze taking over meetings,
because there are no candidates. Being
out of power purifies the party from the adventurers and opportunists with no
real ideals.
In 2008 and 2010, Republican domination started faltering. Democrats became competitive and suddenly a
Judge which found himself/herself running in either party had to make a good
case about their actual merit, rather than lip service to party platform
platitudes. Some of the elections were
so close that it's totally possible the few deciding votes were actually on the
merits rather than the result of a straight ticket pull. This season of competitiveness ended too
quickly in 2018, when the Democrats finally swept all important County
offices. There are still a few
Republican officeholders, but even their combined efforts are not able to
dictate county policy.
But the fact the pendulum has swung the other way would be
only temporarily concerning if it was indeed temporary. But as you see the Democrats cannibalizing
their own you realize the pendulum continued to swing within the Democratic
party. White Democratic Judges started
drawing primary challengers even when the white judge was already doing a good
job and was more qualified than the black candidate. These candidates know that demographic shifts
in the city and in the suburbs of the county made a way for demagoguery and
black identity politics to elect black candidates over better qualified whites,
even within the Democratic party.
In addition to so many blacks now overrepresented on civil
and criminal courts, all the family judges are black women, even though whites
are 70% of Harris County and I suppose half are men. The unfairness inherent in this is that the
idea and concept of family differs from anglo culture to black. With so many blacks coming from broken and
dysfunctional families, it doesn't make sense, on the whole, they should be in
the position to judge people whose culture has family values which often differ
from the values of black Americans. It
presents more opportunities for racial revenge on whites than it does the best interest
of the child.
I have seen the terrible behavior of black women at the
courthouse when they were merely serving as office clerks. They were rude, inhospitable,
incompetent. They talked with snack food
in their mouth and slurped their iced tea as they hunched unhappily over their
work. They had a chip on their shoulder. They took their time on purpose. They made things hard for you if they
could. It's hard to imagine how this
same attitude translates to the judicial office, but one must try to do so in
order to grasp the enormity of the problem that we are facing
prospectively.
It disgusted me, the black clerks and bailiffs who would so
openly gossip and laugh about the fact families were so broken up. The judges do it too. If these judges can't even pose with decorum
and sense for what is furniture for sitting and what is not, do you think they
can make difficult decisions about your future relationship with your children?
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| Some Black Women Judges Posing With a Lack of Decorum for the "Courtroom" |
While one party rule was always wrong, it seemed a rest when
the parties where competitive. Now I
fear that the demographic shift which caused the elevation of unqualified
judges is permanent, If it is, it is the only distinction between our time and
the worst horrors of the competition for power we last saw among the races in
the aftermath of the Civil War.
The lesson of the story is two wrongs make a right. Party
politics should not dictate judicial candidates. In Texas, Judges are allowed to accept money
from attorneys who have cases pending in their courts. This is and was a travesty as much as
partisan elections are. With the
permanent change in county demographics, the corruption can only worsen now
that for those who sit on the bench, a mere reading of the Constitution of our
Republic would constitute a liberal education in and of itself.
It is insulting that attorneys should have to impress an
electorate which is ignorant about law in order to become judges. It is not a political position, and should
not be political; in the same way executive officers and legislators ought to
be political. It leads to nasty
demagoguery on both sides. With the racial
demagoguery going on on the left and right, it appears that the newest racial
demagoguery concerning bail is going to be ineffective. Setting bail is not the reason conservatives
should be against an all non-white judiciary in Harris County.
Using bail as a vehicle for communicating about the obvious
racial problem is unhelpful because it was in fact the founders of our Republic
who took the provisions of the English Bill of Rights of 1688 concerning bail
and ensured they were made the Eight Amendment.
And the 1688 Bill of Rights was itself the product of centuries of
movement towards the right to bail because imprisonment without it was long
used in English history by the Crown to persecute political or religious (and
therefore political) enemies. Bail,
habeas corpus, and other important rights were the invention of the English
legal system, and certainly not the invention of African barbarism.
We need to pay attention to black female judges like Ramona Franklin of the 338th District Court, who has been without notice unilaterally
revoking bail by arbitrarily raising it according to no reason she has
disclosed to the public other than her hysteric whim. I am disappointed to see the majesty of a
legal system my ancestors helped create become a minstrel farce on which hangs
the life, liberty, and property of all our citizens.
We must fix a system which promotes unqualified blacks over
whites simply for the sake of check-marking the diversity box. We must stop allowing judges to take money
from attorneys who have cases pending in that Court. We must stop the election of judges locally
and create a system of executive or hybrid executive and legislative power to
select judges which will have reasonable term limits, mandatory retirement, and
insulation from popular and ignorant demagogic political pressure.
With these reforms, we can say goodbye to the sisters from
the amen corner!
