The Chron gives an enthusiastic endorsement for a full term for the newest State Senator, Molly Cook.
Sen. Molly Cook
Maybe only an emergency room nurse could think that a 14-hour day working at the Capitol is easy.
That seems to be the case for Molly Cook, the energetic community organizer and public health advocate who is still juggling 12-hour nursing shifts while getting used to the very big shoes left by former state Sen. John Whitmire after he was elected Houston mayor. She took on an experienced lawmaker to win a special election and secured another victory in a crowded primary field. Now, Cook, 33, has hit the ground running preparing for the next legislative session beginning in January.
There’s just one more election to win before then.
That shouldn’t be a problem in the reliably blue Senate District 15. Cook’s really been running for the seat since 2021, when, as a political newcomer, she had the audacity to challenge the veteran incumbent. Her loss obviously didn’t deter her. The knowledge she gained campaigning prepared her for the next one and the next one.
She’s still doing the sorts of grassroots work she’s always done as a progressive activist focused on equity, transit and other issues. Only now she has a Senate staff to help. She’s still running on a nurse’s agenda, meaning she’ll use a public health lens, rather than ideology, to evaluate policy. And she said she’s already making good on campaign promises, meeting with senators and state agencies to begin crafting achievable, bipartisan wins as well as considering the more paradigm-shifting work she became known for while challenging the I-45 expansion and championing the voter-driven effort to get more equitable representation for Houston at the regional planning level.
“We’re taking a ‘yes, and’ approach,” she told the editorial board.
Even with her short tenure in the Legislature, voters in the diverse Senate District 15 should feel confident saying yes to sending her back to office in January.
I’m super excited to vote for Sen. Cook in November. I’m expecting big things (in the context of what any Dem can do in Dan Patrick’s Senate) from her.
A couple days before that, the Chron also enthusiastically endorsed Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee.
Christian Menefee
In 1979, the Hawthorn Park Landfill was only a few years old when Texas Southern University sociologist Robert Bullard was asked to study the distribution of solid waste facilities across Houston. Long before the advent of digital maps, they used pushpins to mark suspicious spots. Each time they found a hill, they investigated. Odds were, elevation in Houston was really a landfill. As their research showed, the odds were it was located in a Black and brown community.
More than four decades later, Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee confronted the legacy of that discriminatory pattern when he decided to challenge the Hawthorn Park landfill’s application to expand in Carverdale, a historically Black community on the northwest side of town.
“This is a matter of environmental justice. These folks’ health matters. Their quality of life matters. Enough is enough — we’re going to do all we can to protect them,” Menefee said at the time. The Republican county commissioner representing the area, Tom Ramsey, backed the Democrat’s actions.
When the company withdrew its permit application earlier this year, it was a cause for bipartisan celebration. And a reminder of what Menefee, 36, has managed to achieve since elected in 2020. He helped push the state’s environmental regulator to reconsider concrete batch plant permitting requirements, a win for communities plagued by the often noisy, dusty facilities. He worked on a safety record policy for construction companies working with the county and got unanimous support from Commissioners Court to do so. And he was part of big settlements, including leading the way on one for $20 million with e-cigarette company JUUL for marketing its products to minors, plus another $7 million from a vaping products company.
His Republican challenger criticizes Menefee for being a “firebrand.” Jacqueline Lucci Smith, an attorney and former civil court-at-law judge, told the editorial board she had concerns that Menefee was not neutrally representing his Republican clients the same way he did the Democratic ones.
“I think when you stand up and say that his job is very simple, it’s to ‘sue GOP officials,’ that’s polarizing,” she told us, paraphrasing from a speech Menefee gave at the Democratic party’s state convention.
She left out some important context:
Riffing on what Greg Abbott said about his job when he was attorney general — “I go into the office, I sue the federal government and I go home.” — Menefee told an audience in June: “I have a very simple job, one job. I sue Greg Abbott. I sue Ken Paxton. I sue Republican officials to defend our voting rights, to push for environmental justice and to protect Texans across our great state.”
Standing up to state officials, who at times have targeted the state’s largest blue county unfairly with their policies, doesn’t mean Menefee is shirking his job representing local Republicans in their county capacities. We haven’t heard the kinds of complaints Smith was raising echoed by others.
In fact, when we asked Republican County Commissioner Tom Ramsey about Menefee, he said, “We work well” together, though he cited the 2021 fight over redrawn precinct boundaries as a single exception and questioned Menefee’s interpretation of when commissioners could go into closed session.
The fact is, Menefee has proven himself a capable county attorney. When Commissioners Court had to decide whether to bring delinquent property tax collections in-house in 2022, they unanimously entrusted the role to Menefee’s office. He was able to cite several more examples of gaining bipartisan support and working in the best interest of his government clients, no matter their party.
Here’s a question for Jacqueline Lucci Smith: Do you think Ken Paxton neutrally represents his Democratic clients in Texas the same way he represents his Republican ones? Or is that only a concern in this race? I would also note that Menefee’s actions against the state are almost universally defensive in nature. The aggressiveness he has displayed was provoked, and it entirely appropriate in that context. We’re lucky to have him.
My interview with Christian Menefee from the primary is here, and my interview with Sen. Cook from the primary is here. I don’t generally re-do interviews for the general election, so go listen to those if you haven’t done so already.