The Chron kicks off endorsement season with a fulsome recommendation of Susan Hays for Ag Commissioner.
Susan Hays
Hays, 53, lives in Alpine, where she and her husband purchased land several years ago to grow hemp and hops. Her background is as an attorney and lobbyist, including her 2019 work helping craft the Texas law allowing any hemp product with less than 0.3 percent THC.
Like the Republican incumbent, Sid Miller, she has made medical marijuana legalization central to her campaign.
Hays said she’s taken a close look at other states’ cannabis policies and determined that the successful ones have a well-balanced “three-legged stool” of medicinal access, decriminalization and legalization, all working together to curb the black market and ensure people remain safe.
“You have to think of cannabis regulation holistically,” she told the editorial board, speaking of her frustration with Texas’ piecemeal approach and widely-varying regulations.
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Hays promises to lead the department with integrity, and we think she presents Texans with a better shot at competent leadership than we ever had under Miller. If elected, she told us, her constituents “won’t have to worry if I’m off seeking pseudo medical treatment in another state or directing a staffer to commit unsavory acts for a quick buck.”
She vows to govern pragmatically, not politically, sticking to her duties as agriculture commissioner rather than partisan talking points: “That’s not just abortion and guns — it’s the freeze, it’s seeing the elected officials spend taxpayer dollars and money and media space on often made-up issues, issues based in fear, instead of actually governing,” Hays said.
She seeks to revitalize the State Office of Rural Health, a rural hospital program, and commit the department’s resources to improving rural health care, sorely needed in Texas. The agriculture department oversees the state’s school lunch program, and Hays seeks to make sure students — rural, suburban and urban — are getting healthy Texas food rather than processed food from elsewhere.
If you like a circus act that sucks up oxygen and taxpayer money, vote for Miller. If you want a serious candidate well qualified to run the Texas agriculture department fairly, efficiently, and honestly, we can’t recommend Hays highly enough.
If reading the words isn’t enough for you, listen to my interview with Susan Hays and hear her say these things herself. She’ll make a believer out of you. The Chron editorial necessarily gets into the case against Sid Miller, but they only have so much space for that. It’s so abundantly clear that Hays is the best choice, I don’t know what else to tell you.
On a side note, Beto O’Rourke had himself a pretty good weekend for endorsements, picking them up from the likes of Harry Styles, Willie Nelson, and thirty-five members of Uvalde shooting victims’ families. The ad now running that features the mother of one of the victims is just devastating. I saw it during a football game over the weekend, and it took my breath away. I’m not normally moved by ads, especially political ads – they’re just background noise to me, including the ones for candidates I like. This one was different. Wow.