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December 20th, 2021:

Filing update: How many contested judicial primaries are there? (Part two)

Dec 20th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
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See here for Part One, which covered district and appellate court judges. Today we review the contested Democratic primaries for county court judges and justices of the peace.

County Civil Court At Law #4: Cynthia Castanon, David Patronella, Manpreet Monica Singh, and Treasea Trevino. This is the bench currently held by Judge Lesley Briones, who is running for County Commissioner, Precinct 4. I don’t know offhand if Judge Briones has stepped down yet or not, but in either case there will be someone appointed by Commissioners Court to fill in through the 2022 election. David Patronella is the incumbent Justice of the Peace in Precinct 1, Place 2.

County Criminal Court At Law #2: Incumbent Judge Ronnisha Bowman, Jannell Robles.

County Criminal Court At Law #3: Staci Biggar, Porscha Brown, Lorenzo Williams. The incumbent judge in this court is Judge Erica Hughes, who was just appointed as a US immigration court judge, and is thus not running for re-election.

County Criminal Court At Law #5: Carlos Aguayo, incumbent Judge David Fleischer.

County Criminal Court At Law #6: Selina Alaniz, incumbent Judge Kelley Andrews.

County Criminal Court At Law #7: Mauricio Vazquez, incumbent Judge Andrew Wright.

County Criminal Court At Law #8: Incumbent Judge Franklin Bynum, Erika Ramirez.

County Criminal Court At Law #10: Juanita Jackson, Thuy Le. Jackson appears to have been a candidate for a county criminal court at law in 2010. Incumbent Judge Lee Harper Wilson is not running for re-election. Which is a good thing, as he is not worth anyone’s vote.

County Criminal Court At Law #14: Je’Rell Rogers, incumbent Judge David Singer.

County Probate Court #2: Pamela Medina, incumbent Judge Michael Newman.

Justice of the Peace, Precinct 1 Place 2: Ron Campana, Steve Duble, Victor Lombrana, Sonia Lopez, Jonathan Preston, Chris Watson. This is the JP position that is currently held by David Patronella, who is running for County Court At Law #4.

Justice of the Peace, Precinct 2 Place 2: Dolores Lozano, Blair McClure. Incumbent JP George Risner is running for Commissioners Court in Precinct 2.

Justice of the Peace, Precinct 3 Place 2: Incumbent JP Lucia Bates, Ashleigh Roberson, Herbert Alexander Sanchez.

Justice of the Peace, Precinct 5 Place 2: Eman Afshar, Roderick Rogers. This is a Republican-held position, with the incumbent JP being Jeff Williams. Israel Garcia won the Precinct 5 Position 1 race as a Democrat in 2020. Eman Afshar filed for that position on the ballot but was subsequently disqualified after questions were raised about the petition signatures he submitted as part of his ballot application. However, he remained on the ballot because of the later date on which he was disqualified.

Justice of the Peace, Precinct 6 Place 2: Luis Garza, incumbent JP Angela Rodriguez. JP Rodriguez is the daughter of the longtime previous JP, who was appointed to the position in 2018 following his retirement and was unopposed for election that year.

Finally, I have realized that I missed one race that belonged in the previous post:

208th Criminal District Court: Beverly Armstrong, incumbent Judge Greg Glass, Kim McTorry.

And now you’re as up to date as I can make you at this time. As before, if I didn’t list the race it’s because the incumbent has no primary opponent, and if I don’t link to a webpage or Facebook/Instagram page, it’s because I didn’t find one with a basic Google search. I’m sending out the judicial Q&As and look forward to publishing a bunch of responses from these candidates. Finally, Murray Newman has a few notes about some of these candidates as well.

SCOTUS finds another way to screw abortion rights

Dec 20th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Surely you’re not surprised.

The Supreme Court has formally returned a lawsuit over Texas’ six-week abortion ban to a federal appeals court that has twice allowed the law to stay in effect, rather than to a district judge who sought to block it.

Justice Neil Gorsuch on Thursday signed the court’s order that granted the request of abortion clinics for the court to act speedily. But the clinics wanted the case sent directly to U.S. Judge Robert Pitman, who had previously though briefly blocked enforcement of the Texas abortion ban known as S.B. 8.

When Pitman ordered the law blocked in early October, the appeals court countermanded his order two days later.

Texas has said it will seek to keep the case bottled up at the appeals court for the foreseeable future.

Marc Hearron, the Center for Reproductive Rights lawyer who represented the clinics at the high court, said, “The Supreme Court left only a small sliver of our case intact, and it’s clear that this part of the case will not block vigilante lawsuits from being filed. It’s also clear that Texas is determined to stop the plaintiffs from getting any relief in even the sliver of the case that is left.”

[…]

In last week’s majority opinion written by Gorsuch, the Supreme Court limited who can be sued by the clinics in their effort to win a court order preventing the law’s enforcement and allowing them to resume providing abortions without severe financial risks.

The court held that only state licensing officials can be sued, an outcome the clinics said would not stave off the filing of lawsuits against providers if abortions were to resume.

Gorsuch wrote that “it appears” the licensing officials can be sued. “Of course, Texas courts and not this one are the final arbiters of the meaning of state statutory directions,” he wrote.

The state told the justices it plans to ask the appeals court to, in turn, seek a definitive ruling from the Texas Supreme Court over the role the licensing officials play in enforcing the abortion ban.

The appeals court would decide whether to involve the state high court, which would put the case on hold.

See here for the background. I’m going to outsource the commentary, as it’s hard for me to form the right words here.

I suppose it’s possible that the Fifth Circuit will do the right thing and hand this back to the district court so the process can play out. And I suppose that if they try to hand it to SCOTx that they will refuse to take it, on the grounds that they don’t like having to deal with messy political questions. Or either the Fifth Circuit and/or SCOTx just sits on the ball until SCOTUS officially drives a spike through Roe v Wade and moots the whole thing. I’m going to go scream into a pillow now. The Trib has more.

Come watch Ken Paxton light your tax dollars on fire

Dec 20th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
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I mean, Theranos would have delivered a greater return on investment than this.

Best mugshot ever

Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton has been one of former President Donald Trump’s most reliable allies in spreading the myth of widespread voter fraud, particularly in the 2020 election, and frequently boasts that few states are as vigilant.

His office’s election integrity unit added two lawyers to the team in the last year, bringing it up to six staffers total, and worked more than 20,000 hours between October 2020 and September 2021. Its budget, meanwhile, ratcheted up from $1.9 million to $2.2 million during that time.

Yet records from the office show that the unit closed just three cases this year, down from 17 last year, and opened seven new ones. That includes the newly created unit focused on the 2021 local elections, which has yet to file a single case.

“This is an exorbitant amount of money that has resulted in no benefit for the average Texan,” said Austin Evers, executive director of American Oversight, a left-leaning nonprofit government watchdog that regularly files public information requests and files suits to force compliance with those requests. The organization shared some records it obtained from the Texas Attorney General’s Office with Hearst Newspapers for this report; others were obtained independently by Hearst Newspapers.

Evers added: “Taxpayers are funding a political stunt meant to fuel the false claim of a stolen election and justify voting restrictions.”

[…]

Richard L. Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California at Irvine, said there’s a more likely explanation, noting that Paxton, who is running for re-election, has “every incentive,” politically speaking, to vigorously go after voter fraud, as it’s an issue that energizes his party’s base.

“He’s finding very little of it despite spending a lot of money and using a lot of resources looking for it,” Hasen said. “The reason is not that such fraud is too hard to find. Those that commit voter fraud tend not to be brain surgeons. The reason he’s not finding a lot of it is because voter fraud is rare.”

Multiple academic studies and journalistic reviews have uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud, nor did a wide-ranging investigation of election fraud in 2020 conducted by the U.S. Justice Department.

There’s more, and the story does a good job of highlighting how Paxton takes the ridiculously small numbers involved in his crusade and exaggerates them to make them sound slightly less small, so read the rest. Just understand that facts have nothing to do with any of this, and won’t do anything to deter Paxton and his raving band of saboteurs. The argument here is exactly the same as the ones that Republicans have been using for at least the last 20 years for spending on “border security”: If they catch more cases of “vote fraud” it means that what they’re doing is working and so they need to get more money for it. If they catch fewer cases, it means that they’re falling behind and need to get more money to keep up. There are no circumstances under which spending less on this useless and harmful exercise makes sense.

One more thing:

While it’s true that the office has more cases pending this year over last year, 44 up from 38, that’s not because of a surge in new prosecutions. It’s because the vast majority of cases that were pending around this time last year are still making their way through the court system.

Among the cases pending include that of Hervis Rogers, a Black man from Houston who was charged this year with illegally voting while on parole, after he had made national headlines for waiting six hours to vote in the 2020 primary election.

A new ruling from the state’s highest criminal court Wednesday may afford legal relief to Rogers and potentially others, after it found that Paxton’s office does not have the constitutional right to prosecute voter fraud without the consent of local prosecutors.

Yes, given that recent ruling, one has to wonder how much of this activity is even legal at this point. I would suggest that attorneys for every one of the defendants in Paxton’s crosshairs, as well as all of those that have been convicted or pled guilty to something, start filing briefs to have cases and convictions tossed. Let’s expose this for the mockery it is.

Climate change and freezing weather

Dec 20th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

A little science for you.

It was the coldest February Texas had seen in more than four decades, and the sustained blast of arctic air knocked out much of the state’s power grid for several days, causing hundreds of deaths and billions of dollars in damage.

Yet 2021 also brought the planet’s 16th-warmest February since records began. On average, winters are getting more mild because climate change has increased temperatures worldwide. How could a warmer world bring such a severe cold snap to Texas?

Scientists say they are still working to understand the relationship between climate change and extreme winter weather patterns. Many factors can influence localized cold snaps, and evidence suggests that climate change is affecting longstanding climate patterns in new ways.

“The way those kinds of events occur involve a lot more complicated atmospheric processes,” said Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist and acting deputy director for Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts.

Francis and other scientists said there’s a significant body of research that can help explain why Texas — and other areas of the U.S. — may still experience extreme cold from time to time amid an overall warming of the planet.

“Maybe there was some nuance that was missed when people started talking about winters disappearing and how we’re never going to see snow again,” said Judah Cohen, a leading scholar on winter weather and climate change and the director of seasonal forecasting at the climate analytics company Atmospheric and Environmental Research. “People say, ‘I was told one thing and I’m experiencing something else.’”

Several factors impact the frequency and severity of cold spells in Texas, from the strength of the polar vortex — a seasonal, swirling mass of cold air that circles high above the Arctic — to whether we’re in an El Niño or a La Niña year, which influences whether Texas has a wet or dry winter, to the natural patterns that influence the position and strength of the jet stream, which can determine the path and duration of weather systems.

Here’s what factors scientists say can cause an extreme cold snap to hit Texas — and how such storms may be influenced by climate change.

You should read the rest, because it’s pretty interesting. The science is still being developed, and so there’s disagreement about some of the findings, but the big picture is there. You might familiarize yourself with the concept of a “polar vortex”, because it’s a key factor. Hope for the best and be prepared, whatever happens.