Imagine that you’re transported to some faraway planet and it’s Election Day there.
Curious about deep space democracy, you study the races and the choices for top law enforcement official catch your eye.
Candidate A has 20 years experience as a judge, including a decade on the high court, she’s well-respected and credible, and has an inspiring life story of rising up from humble means to great success.
Candidate B has spent his entire incumbency mired in scandal and a cloud of criminal allegations. He’s been delaying trial for seven years on three felony charges related to securities fraud, including one charge he already admitted to on paper. On top of that, seven of his own high-ranking staffers blew the whistle to law enforcement, alleging corruption and abuse of office stemming from favors for a campaign donor. His lawyering skills are bumbling, losing high-profile cases important to his political party and filing a preposterous lawsuit to overturn a fair election that was tossed out of the highest court with whiplash speed. Members of his own party have asked him to resign. If that weren’t enough, he was once caught on camera pocketing somebody else’s pricey pen in a courthouse security line.
Yet, it seems Candidate B is favored to win.
You shake your head incredulously murmuring, “On what other planet could that guy keep his seat?”
Answer: on Planet Texas.
Candidate B, of course, is Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, 59, whose taint has shamed his party, his state, desecrated the law-and-order principles many Republicans hold dear and led this editorial board long ago to call for his resignation. Since he has refused, Republican voters should fire him.
Even those who can stomach allegations of criminal wrongdoing and an extramarital affair have to be vexed by his incompetence in executing GOP priorities, notably wasting millions on his fruitless snipe hunt for voter fraud and sloppy handling of a lawsuit challenging Obamacare that even Justice Clarence Thomas couldn’t abide.
Republicans can’t trust Paxton to enforce the laws of this state when he won’t follow them himself. Recently, he flat-out refused to comply with the Texas Public Information Act when newspapers across the state sought his cell phone communications while in Washington D.C. amid the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
Candidate A, meanwhile, is former Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman, who promises to restore integrity to the Office of Attorney General on Day One. On Day Two, she says she’ll restore the qualified staff who left the office after reporting Paxton to the FBI for alleged bribery and other criminal acts.
And Day Three? Well, this is Texas. She vows to start suing the Biden administration for government overreach.
She had a solid reputation on Texas’ highest civil court, and in 2016, although she joined her colleagues in upholding Texas’ rickety school finance structure, she argued for reform in a concurring opinion, writing that “Shortfalls in both resources and performance persist in innumerable respects, and a perilously large number of students is in danger of falling further behind.”
Guzman, 61, grew up in Houston’s East End, daughter of a welder and a janitor who immigrated to this country legally.
Another top priority for Guzman is to revamp one of the AG’s major duties: collection of child support payments. Guzman vows to stand up for Texas families and children, for the unborn and the vulnerable, for veterans and working Texans, for law enforcement and those who demand election integrity.
On border security, she suggests things that haven’t been tried, such as suing the federal government to get more magistrates down to the border to handle asylum cases.
Those are solid conservative priorities that we believe Republicans can trust her to execute with honor and class, virtues that impress not only ordinary Texans but judges who consider the AG’s arguments.
“I know how judges think,” Guzman told us. “If a lawyer loses credibility, what does that say about the arguments they’re bringing?”
How Guzman can be an underdog in this race boggles the mind.
Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush, 45, grandson and nephew of former presidents, is riding the name-ID to far out-raise Guzman. But he can’t compete on qualifications. Guzman points out that he only renewed his Texas law license in late 2020. Some of the uproar over Bush’s handling of the Alamo’s redesign seems overblown; we’re not sure what superhuman Texan could herd those sacred cats. Our chief concerns involve his sluggish delivery of Hurricane Harvey funds and his agency’s outrageously unfair snub of Houston and Harris County in allocating the first round of long-awaited flood mitigation aid.
Of the more than $1 billion Bush’s office dispersed, the most populous city and county in the state that had suffered the most deaths and damage during Harvey didn’t get one cent. The culprit appears to be a metric that actually penalized areas that had more people. Even more troubling was Bush’s deceptive excuses, at one point claiming that the feds came up with the metric, which the feds disputed, saying Texas had “full responsibility and jurisdiction” over who got money and how it was doled out.
After days of harsh, bipartisan criticism, Bush pledged to give $750 million to Harris County but the whole ordeal isn’t befitting of a candidate seeking a post that requires fairness and neutrality.
As for Louie Gohmert, we had hoped the clownish, eight-term congressman’s late entry into the race was but a cleverly written submission for the satirical publication The Onion. Alas, he really is running, touting his time as a district judge in Smith County, a stint on a Texas appellate court, as well as his hawkishness on the border. But even Gohmert, who is 68 and acknowledges that some consider him the dumbest guy in Congress, sounds sage when he’s condemning Paxton: “He deserves his day in court, but Texans shouldn’t be punished for his actions,” he says in a campaign video. “Ill restore the rule of law and trust me, I’ll be the woke mob’s worst nightmare.”
We’d take that nightmare any day over the one Paxton has wrought.
Luckily, we don’t have to. Republicans who want to restore integrity, ethics and the rule of law to the Texas AG’s office have a stellar choice in Guzman.
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