A couple of endorsements of interest for you. First, the Chron stuck with incumbent Sheriff Ed Gonzalez.
Sheriff Ed Gonzalez
A routine inspection of the state’s largest jail really shouldn’t garner headlines. Meeting “minimum safety standards” should never be cause for celebration for a facility designed to house thousands of people who, under the law, are innocent until proven guilty of the criminal charges they’re facing.
Yet when the Texas Commission on Jail Standards delivered a certificate of compliance last month to the Harris County Jail, it was hailed by Sheriff Ed Gonzalez as “an important achievement,” a reflection of how low the jail’s standards sank during Gonzalez’s second term. It was the first time in two years that the jail passed its four-day inspection, a hopeful sign that Gonzalez has finally begun to root out a culture of violence and inhumane treatment that has turned the facility into one of the deadliest jails in the state.
For Gonzalez, 55, the timing of the jail certification was fortuitous. He is running for a third term as county sheriff, a point at which even popular politicians begin to wear out their welcome. Gonzalez, a Democrat, is a former homicide detective, hostage negotiator and District H City Council member. He is generally well-liked and seems to strike that difficult balance between crime fighter and compassionate reformer. Yet naysayers, including but not limited to his Republican opponent Mike Knox, contend that Gonzalez lacks fire and a sense of urgency, particularly regarding his stewardship of the jail.
“We’ve seen rapes in the jail, we’ve seen drug dealing in the jail, we’ve got lawyers importing drugs,” Knox told us during our endorsement screening last week with Gonzalez. “I think that’s primarily due to the lack of supervision. That is, the policies within the sheriff’s department are not bad policies; they’re just not being enforced.”
He has a point. While Gonzalez doesn’t have any control over who comes into the jail and how long they stay there, he has failed to create a safe environment for detainees and guards.
[…]
Gonzalez pointed to mitigating circumstances beyond his control which have made it difficult to bring the jail population down. The combination of Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and the COVID-19 pandemic, he says, “brought the near collapse of our local court system,” snarling cases and trials for months, and creating a massive backlog of felony cases that contributed to an uptick in crime. An enormous population of mentally ill defendants has turned the jail into one of the largest mental health facilities in the state, despite having a staff largely unqualified to care for them. A 2023 Houston Landing analysis found that 60% of the people who died of unnatural causes in the jail over the past decade had “documented mental health concerns.”
Amid all of these challenges, Gonzalez can still point to real signs of progress. In-custody deaths have decreased in the past two years, from 27 in 2022 to seven so far this year, and Gonzalez noted there are fewer suicides than at any other point in his tenure. He was able to secure 12% pay raises from Commissioners Court last year for jail staff, and poured $20 million into filling vacancies, which have declined from 180 to 139 over the past three months. To improve transparency and accountability, Gonzalez pushed for the county to fund body cameras, the first jail in the state to require officers to wear them.
“It’s been a long road, it’s been a challenging one,” Gonzalez told us. “We’re currently in compliance and we’re going to continue to work very hard to maintain that and improve that.”
The Chron’s recommendation of Sheriff Gonzalez was partly based on the aforementioned progress and partly on challenger Knox’s policy positions and lack of knowledge. I intend to interview the Sheriff in the coming weeks, so I hope to be able to talk about this stuff.
The Chron also endorsed challenger Melissa McDonough over first-term CD38 Congressman Wesley Hunt.
Melissa McDonough
The world needs more candidates like Melissa McDonough. Not only is the moderate Democrat willing to wage an uphill battle for a congressional seat tailor-made for a Republican and currently represented by a Trump-endorsed Iraq War veteran elected in 2022 by 28 points. She assembled a focus group of Republicans, including her own pastor, to learn what exactly they were looking for in a politician.
The answers surprised her. They didn’t want all the talk about her background or qualifications or policy platform. They didn’t want talk about Hunt’s missteps, including those that have led to a formal ethics investigation. They wanted action.
“What we discovered in our Republican focus group is just: ‘Tell me you’re gonna get it done and go do it,'” McDonough told the editorial board. “‘Just tell me you’re going to fix this. You’re going to work diligently on it, and it’s going to be your full-time job.'”
With that simplified message, McDonough, 52, a Realtor from Tomball, says she has attracted many Republicans to volunteer for her in a district gerrymandered to include urban neighborhoods within the 610 Loop such as River Oaks and cities on the outskirts of Harris County such as Cypress. It’s a “purple” coalition bound by commonsense positions on issues such as reducing gun violence by passing legislation to supply safes to gun owners; improving access to health care by using federal dollars to fund health clinics in public schools; and even — to her surprise — abortion, where she’s appealed to voters who care about bodily autonomy and understand that the procedure is sometimes necessary to save the life of a mother.
McDonough says her pastor told her: “‘Melissa, this is a needle and a little hole you’re trying to thread. And I’m like, ‘I know, but we can do it, and it can happen, and it is happening.’ So I love that we’re able to bring these purple solutions and just keep going with it.”
It helps McDonough that Hunt, 42, has had a rocky first term in office. While he’s an active surrogate for Donald Trump, crisscrossing the nation to appear at his rallies and even getting a coveted speaking slot at the Republican National Convention, he appears to be less active as a legislator. According to GovTrack, a nonpartisan database that monitors Congress, Hunt has missed more than 16% of roll call votes, far worse than the median of 2% among current representatives. Hunt, who did not meet with the editorial board, occasionally reaches across the aisle — he and Democratic U.S. Rep. Lizzie Fletcher have joined forces to push the Army Corps of Engineers to complete the study of an underground drainage tunnel system in Houston — but despite being a “rising star” in the House majority, only one of the eight bills he’s sponsored even made it to the floor for a vote. That one legislation — a technical bill regarding royalties on oil and gas production — was signed into law this month.
You can listen to my interview with McDonough from the primary here. Rep. Hunt also has some possible ethical issues, which the editorial notes. Let’s be clear that his “rising star” status doesn’t have anything to do with mundane things like passing bills – it’s all about media appearances and brand building. He’s a strong favorite to be able to keep doing that, but it would be nice to see his margin of victory get knocked down a bit. I’m necessarily skeptical of the “Republican focus group” stuff, but as is often the case I’ll be delighted to be proven wrong.