There is a fundamental threat to the power of the people in Texas that gains momentum every few years and only gets suppressed when citizens forcefully tell legislators to back off. Sadly there are many establishment insider Republicans who support this dangerous move to take power away from you and hand it to insiders.
My friend Michael Quinn Sullivan recently wrote about this issue which I have been deeply involved in fighting for well over twenty years. Sullivan wrote:
“The Texas Constitution guarantees Texans the right to select their judges at the ballot box. In recent years, it has become fashionable in crony-elitist circles to denigrate Texas’ method of judicial selection. After all, you can’t trust mere citizens with the courts, right?”
The move to end political party affiliation in judicial elections has gained steam lately but that move, bad in its own right, is simply a first step to the long stated goal of ending the election of judges at every level in Texas.
Judicial commissions and other methods of naming judges don’t end conflicts of interest, those systems simply move such into a narrower set of hands and take them out of the full sunshine elections provide.
Those who view themselves as legal elites and think the public too stupid to elect their judges want to start with ending party affiliation so we have less of an idea of what judicial philosophy judges on the ballot may hold; then the goal is to end election of the top court judges; then the appeals court judges; then all the way to your local trial court benches.
Judicial commissions and other methods of naming judges don’t end conflicts of interest, those systems simply move such into a narrower set of hands and take them out of the full sunshine elections provide. At its purest, the move to end the election of Texas judges is a direct attach on you, to take that significant power from you and hand it to political insiders making them more powerful.
As I said when you interviewed me on Tuesday, I have always supported and will always support the right of Texans to elect their judges. Only half the states allow their citizens to have this right, and we must stand all efforts to take it away.
Good position, I never suggested you had any other.