The Chron’s endorsement process has been a bit haphazard this season – there are times when it looks like they’ve got a theme going, then they deviate from it in some head-scratching way that makes it hard for me to do these posts in a coherent manner. They gave us three endorsements on Saturday, two from Supreme Court races and the SD11 race, so I’m just going to roll with it and give them all to you here.
Susan Criss
Within hours of the 2005 Texas City Refinery explosion that killed 15 workers, Judge Susan Criss of the Texas 212nd District Court in Galveston County began meeting with lawyers representing victims and BP to begin handling what would eventually number 4,005 settled claims. After Hurricane Ike in 2008, Criss again oversaw a massive number of disputes over insurance claims even as she struggled to repair her own flooded home.
As a result of her judicial experience, and time as a criminal defense lawyer, Criss has an exceptionally deep understanding of how Texas laws can be improved. She is bursting with ideas for criminal justice reform, mitigating flood damage and making the workings of the Legislature more transparent. We believe all this adds up to make her an extraordinary candidate for the Texas Senate and Democrats’ best choice for Senate District 11 in the March 3 primary.
No argument from me. Susan Criss is a super candidate, and her opponent in the primary doesn’t appear to be running much of a campaign.
Larry Praeger for Supreme Court, Place 6:
Houston lawyer Kathy Cheng sees her race for a seat on the Texas Supreme Court as a prime opportunity for voters to break up what many see as a monoculture among the nine justices currently sitting on the state’s top civil court. There are six men and three women. Of them, only one justice — Eva Guzman — is Hispanic. There are no African-Americans, no Asian Americans and no Democrats, either.
Cheng says her experience as an immigrant, a woman, and a person of color equips her to see the world — and where the law fits into it — with more nuance and depth than her opponent, in part because he is white.
“If you don’t experience, say, racism in your own life, then you won’t have as deep, or as broad, an understanding of what that experience is like or what it means,” she said, describing the extra awareness she believes she’d bring to her role on the bench.
We agree with Cheng that this court could use a greater dose of diversity — and not just along racial lines. More variety in life experience, in legal practice and, yes, political ideology would be welcome. After all, how can judges apply the law to the facts of daily life in legal disputes without ready antennae capable of reading life in all its variegated nuance?
Cheng goes too far, however, to suggest that a vote for her opponent, Larry Praeger of Dallas, would be a missed opportunity to bring diversity of any kind to the court. Praeger, a former prosecutor who has built up his own mostly family law practice over 20 years, would also bring a radically different perspective to the court.
Cheng ran for this same Supreme Court position in 2018, losing to Jeff Brown, who has since stepped down, thus opening the seat and necessitating its spot on the ballot again. I don’t know much about Praeger. Both have received some endorsements, according to the Erik Manning spreadheet.
Peter Kelly for Supreme Court, Place 8:
Justice Peter Kelly of the 1st District Court of Appeals in Houston is our choice between two very qualified candidates in the Democratic primary for Place 8 on the Texas Supreme Court.
Both Kelly and his opponent, Justice Gisela Triana of the 3rd Court of Appeals in Austin, have served a little over a year as appellate court judges — so it is their experience prior to their election in 2018 that is the best gauge for voters in assessing what kind of Supreme Court justice they will make. And on that basis, we find Kelly’s decades-long career as an appellate lawyer, one who has argued roughly 30 cases before the court he now wishes to join, a stronger indicator of success than Triana’s impressively diverse career as a trial court judge.
[…]
Democrats are lucky to have two qualified choices in this race, but we urge them to vote for Kelly.
Not much to add here. Either candidate would have to be replaced on their current bench if they win in November, so Greg Abbott will get to appoint someone. That’s the price we pay for having candidates who have previously won elections.