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February 9th, 2023:

January 2023 campaign finance reports: HCC

Previously: City of Houston, Harris County, HISD

As with HISD, I last checked in on HCC Trustee campaign finance reports was last January. Three of these people will be on the ballot if they all run again, but we’ll see about that.

Monica Flores Richart – Dist 1
Charlene Ward Johnson – Dist 2
Adriana Tamez – Dist 3
Reagan Flowers – Dist 4
Robert Glaser – Dist 5
Dave Wilson – Dist 6
Cynthia Lenton-Gary – Dist 7
Eva Loredo – Dist 8
Pretta VanDible Stallworth – Dist 9


Dist  Candidate     Raised      Spent     Loan     On Hand
==========================================================
1       Richart          0          0        0       2,608
2       Johnson      1,585      2,781    5,000       1,196
3         Tamez          0        127        0      10,980
4       Flowers          0        991        0       2,199
5        Glaser          0          0    4,000       8,292
6        Wilson          0          0        0           0
7   Lenton-Gary          0          0        0           0
8        Loredo          0      1,427    7,000       4,777
9    Stallworth          0          0        0           0

Reagan Flowers, Robert Glaser, and Pretta VanDible Stallworth are the Trustees whose terms are up this year. Glaser is the interesting case, given the lawsuit alleging sexual harassment against him. I still don’t know where that stands despite the previous agenda item to discuss a possible settlement. HCC campaigns are small dollar and low profile, so it’s not like he’d face months of having his name dragged through the mud if he runs again. But he still might decide to go away quietly, because who needs this trouble? It could go either way.

Charlene Ward Johnson, who won a special election runoff last June to fill the remainder of Rhonda Skillern-Jones’ term, is the only person to raise any money in the last six months. Glaser’s cash on hand total is exactly the same as it was in last January’s report, meaning he has neither raised nor spent any money in the past year

Reagan Flowers closed out her state campaign finance account after her unsuccessful run for HD147, so she doesn’t have any further funds at her disposal.

That’s it for the January finance reports. The July 2023 ones will tell us more about where the election is this year. Let me know what you think.

Abbott tells state agencies and universities to hire more white people

I mean, let’s be honest, that’s what this is about.

Gov. Greg Abbott’s office is warning state agency and public university leaders this week that the use of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives — policies that support groups who have been historically underrepresented or discriminated against — is illegal in hiring.

In a memo written Monday and obtained by The Texas Tribune, Abbott’s chief of staff Gardner Pate told agency leaders that using DEI policies violates federal and state employment laws, and hiring cannot be based on factors “other than merit.”

Pate said DEI initiatives illegally discriminate against certain demographic groups — though he did not specify which ones he was talking about.

“The innocuous sounding notion of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) has been manipulated to push policies that expressly favor some demographic groups to the detriment of others,” Pate wrote.

Diversity, equity and inclusion is a moniker used for policies developed to provide guidance in workplaces, government offices and college campuses intended to increase representation and foster an environment that emphasizes fair treatment to groups that have historically faced discrimination. DEI policies can include resources for underrepresented groups, which can include people with disabilities, LGBTQ people and veterans. In hiring, it can include setting diversity goals or setting thresholds to ensure that a certain number of diverse candidates are interviewed. At universities, DEI offices are often focused on helping students of color or nontraditional students stay in school and graduate.

[…]

Andrew Eckhous, an Austin-based lawyer for Kaplan Law Firm, which specializes in employment and civil rights litigation, said the governor’s office is “completely mischaracterizing DEI’s role in employment decisions” in an apparent attempt to block initiatives that improve diversity.

“Anti-discrimination laws protect all Americans by ensuring that employers do not make hiring decisions based on race, religion, or gender, while DEI initiatives work in tandem with those laws to encourage companies to solicit applications from a wide range of applicants, which is legal and beneficial,” Eckhous said in an email.

“The only piece of news in this letter is that Governor Abbott is trying to stop diversity initiatives for the apparent benefit of some unnamed demographic that he refuses to disclose,” he added.

The letter cites federal and state anti-discrimination laws as the underpinning for why Pate says DEI initiatives are illegal. Those laws notably have come about as a response to discrimination over several decades.

President Lyndon B. Johnson prohibited employment discrimination based on race, sex, religion and national origin as part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, during a time when people of color, especially Black Americans, were excluded from higher-wage jobs based on race.

The Chron adds some details.

The letter is setting up a major clash with nearly every public university in Texas, where the benefits of diversity have been championed. The University of Texas, Texas A&M University and the University of Houston have made DEI programs central to their missions.

[…]

On its website, Texas A&M’s Office of Diversity declares its responsibility to help academic units “embed diversity, equity, and inclusion in academic and institutional excellence.”

The University of Texas at San Antonio, through its business school, offers a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Certificate Program.

At UT, each college, school and unit has a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion officer as well as a website to highlight the importance of those efforts, a change made after campuswide student protests in 2017 led to the removal of statues of Confederate soldiers like Robert E. Lee.

In the warning letter, first reported on by the Texas Tribune, Abbott’s chief of staff Gardner Pate claims such efforts backfire:

“Indeed, rather than increasing diversity in the workplace, these DEI initiatives are having the opposite effect and are being advanced in ways that proactively encourage discrimination in the workplace,” he wrote.

Pate’s letter comes after a high-profile lawsuit last year aimed at Texas A&M University’s hiring practices for college faculty.

A University of Texas at Austin associate professor, who is white, sued the Texas A&M University System on behalf of white and Asian faculty candidates, alleging racial discrimination in a fellowship program intended to improve diversity on the College Station campus. The program sought to hire mid-career and senior tenure-track professors from “underrepresented minority groups.”

The UT associate professor’s lawsuit is being led by American First Legal, a group created by Stephen Miller, former President Donald Trump’s senior policy adviser.

I Am Not A Lawyer, and I know that there’s a case before SCOTUS that’s aimed at gutting affirmative action. It still seems to me that claiming that DEI efforts are “illegal” is at best a wild overstatement. Maybe a claim that they’re not required could be plausible. I expect you could defend that in court. But illegal? Not today, at least, and maybe not even after whatever atrocity SCOTUS commits on the affirmative action case. The idea here is to make people think it’s illegal, and that it’s not worth the risk of incurring Abbott’s wrath, and voila, you get the outcome you want without actually having to change anything. We’ll see how these universities respond, but especially with the Lege in session and the budget being constructed, I don’t like the odds.

UPDATE: Texas Tech is already folding, though UH doesn’t appear to be taking the bait. Could be worse, I guess.

RIP, Jeff Blackburn

Here’s a guy who made a difference.

In the summer of 1999, police in the tiny town of Tulia carried out one of the largest drug stings in West Texas history. Nearly 50 people were arrested, almost all of them Black, and several were quickly sentenced to life in prison. “Tulia’s Streets Cleared of Garbage,” the local newspaper declared.

Convictions in the remaining cases seemed all but certain, even though they were riddled with inconsistencies. None of the defendants had drugs on them when they were arrested and the allegations against them hinged on the often-contradictory testimony of a single undercover police officer. So in a last-ditch effort, one of the defendants’ lawyers asked for help from a prominent young attorney in Amarillo named Jeff Blackburn.

Over the next four years, Blackburn exposed one of the country’s most celebrated drug busts as a sham. Together with a team of lawyers and activists, he helped prove that the undercover officer was a serial liar. He secured early releases for dozens of the defendants and even convinced then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry to pardon them.

Blackburn’s work in Tulia helped set the stage for more than a decade of reforms to Texas’ criminal justice system — many of which are still considered the most transformational in the country. As founder of the Innocence Project of Texas, he helped exonerate dozens more people and, in the process, convinced lawmakers to do improve evidence requirements in criminal cases and increase compensation for the wrongfully convicted.

On Tuesday, the man once called the “trouble-makingest lawyer in West Texas” died of kidney cancer at age 65. In a series of recent interviews with the Houston Chronicle, Blackburn reflected on the changes that he helped bring about and insisted that the work was bigger than any one person.

“I really dislike the notion of people going, ‘Here was this extraordinary guy or person, and that’s how things happened,’” he said from his home near Taos, New Mexico, where he lived out his final days with friends and family. “I’m an ordinary lawyer.”

Any other conclusion, Blackburn said, is “essentially discouraging regular people to take up the cause.”

Blackburn went on to found the Innocence Project of Texas, helped get the Timothy Cole Act and Timothy Cole Innocence Commission passed, pushed for reforms on the use of confidential informants, and more. I blogged about the Tulia stuff here, and I think the original Texas Observer story about it is here. The Chron’s obit for him is long and richly detailed, so go read it. It’s also a reminder that a lot of work on this subject remains – among other things, it’s still easy for corrupt cops who get fired at one law enforcement agency to get hired by another, a key aspect to the Tulia story – and the bipartisan consensus on various forms of criminal justice reform has largely been broken. But that work is as urgent as ever, and it’s not going to do itself. Read about Jeff Blackburn and remember his legacy.

Texas blog roundup for the week of February 6

The Texas Progressive Alliance hopes everyone has their power back by now as it brings you this week’s roundup.

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