The Chron is meandering along through their primary endorsements. I can’t complain too much, they’re making progress and we’re still more than a week away from the start of early voting, it’s just that there’s no pattern to it. Whatever. Next on their list is Allison Mathis, the challenger for the 338th Criminal District Court.
Allison Jackson Mathis
Allison Mathis had no plans to run for district court judge in Harris County. One hearing she observed last spring as a spectator in Judge Ramona Franklin’s courtroom changed everything.
Mathis watched as Franklin rejected Eric Cano’s request to die at home with his family. Cano, who was charged with murder in 2020 after being accused of shooting a man after a drunken fight, was terminally ill from cirrhosis in his liver. He could not walk or bathe himself and was in a declining mental state with weeks left to live at a county jail ill-equipped to provide hospice care. Unmoved, Franklin denied Cano’s request to release him on a lower bond. Cano died in custody weeks later.
“The defendant was dying on a gurney in a hallway in a dirty diaper, and then she refused to reduce his bond,” Mathis said. “And so I decided if no one else was going to primary (Franklin), that I would.”
We’re glad someone did. Franklin, first elected to the 338th District Court in 2016, has had a tumultuous second term that raises serious questions about her fitness for the bench.
[…]
Mathis, 40, is a native Houstonian yet her first job as an attorney sent her across the Pacific Ocean as a public defender in the Republic of Palau, a small island nation, where she says she litigated a case that ended their practice of solitary confinement. She returned to the U.S. and began a somewhat nomadic career as a public defender, first in Fort Bend County, then in Aztec, N.M., then for the Swinomish Indian Tribal Reservation in Washington state.
Mathis returned to Harris County in 2019 and joined the public defender’s office, first as a felony trial attorney and then as the lead attorney in the office’s post-conviction writs division. After leaving to start her own defense practice, she represented migrant defendants who were ensnared for trespassing under Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star program.
My Q&A with Mathis is here. I sent a Q&A to Judge Franklin but have not received a response from her; if I do, I will put it in the queue. The Chron covers some of the information she included in her Q&A. Whether it’s been her own campaigning or whether Judge Franklin had a bad reputation I can’t say, but one look at Mathis’ campaign Facebook page shows that she’s been racking up the endorsements. That’s quite remarkable for a challenger to a two-term incumbent, who if nothing else has had the time to establish relationships with the various political groups. You never know what will happen in a judicial primary, but there are clear indicators in this one.
The Chron then goes back to Congress to endorse Melissa McDonough in CD38.
McDonough, 51, is a Realtor with a passion for extracurricular political activism. She has traveled to Austin and Washington, D.C., independently and for the National Association of Realtors to lobby the Legislature and Congress.
“When you go to the table, you go to the table with solutions, and you go with a wide variety that will hit somewhere in the middle,” McDonough told the editorial board. “We’ve been able to find common ground with children and education, we’ve been able to find common ground with expansion of health care, we’ve been finally able to find common ground on how to turn the chaos that is seen in 45-second sound bites into something meaningful that voters can tangibly grasp onto.”
In her spare time, McDonough organizes working groups where bankers and mortgage lenders connect with low-income renters to help set them on a path toward home ownership.
McDonough’s “purple” solutions include using Title 1 federal funding to fund health clinics in public schools that can provide care for low-income children. For a district where flooding is a perennial concern, she wants to ensure that FEMA’s disaster fund is solvent, while also thinking big-picture about new infrastructure such as underground tunnels that can convey floodwaters to the Houston Ship Channel. She wants to balance federal subsidies for oil and gas as well as renewables while providing funding to leverage the ingenuity of the district’s Energy Corridor to cultivate new energy sources.
McDonough’s opponent, Gion Thomas, 31, is a community activist and former semi-pro football player who runs a nonprofit that focuses on getting young people registered to vote and politically active. Thomas is campaigning on bold ideas such as Medicare for All and a $20 per hour minimum wage and reducing federal subsidies for oil and gas to combat climate change.
Thomas’ passion for uplifting working class people is genuine and admirable. We believe McDonough’s more moderate platform stands a better chance of swinging votes in a general election against Hunt and being a more effective representative in Congress.
My interview with Melissa McDonough is here and my interview with Gion Thomas is here. As with the last two races in which the Chron endorsed, this is a longshot battle. At least here there are two candidates who are both running active campaigns, and that’s a good place to start. Listen to those interviews if you’re in the district and make your choice.