Mealer is the best choice in the GOP runoff
The choice before Republican voters for county judge may feel familiar to some in Harris County. A youngish woman with impressive energy and intellect (and a slight edge in the primary) but no political experience, is facing off against a longtime Houstonian and established party man who, in this case, is not an incumbent but certainly has the Rolodex of one.
Alexandra del Moral Mealer, 37, is a West Point graduate and former U.S. Army captain who had hundreds of soldiers under her command in Afghanistan in her 20s. Vidal Martinez, 67, has been a fixture in Houston, serving on influential boards, working a short stint as a federal prosecutor as well as helping lead the lawsuit that brought two new city council seats to Houston to increase representation for the city’s Hispanic residents.
Their positions are often remarkably similar. The editorial board found subtle but significant differences in how they presented these positions.
On the most prominent campaign issues, crime and criminal justice, they’ve both promised to dismantle the consent decree in a federal lawsuit that addressed Harris County’s unconstitutional misdemeanor bail practices and took aim at racial disparities in pretrial detention and posttrial outcomes as well as money bail’s tenuous connections to public safety.
“I agree your wealth should not be (an) indicator of whether you’re behind bars or not,” Mealer told us in our candidate screening. Still, both she and Martinez insisted that judges making decisions in felony cases have succumbed to political pressure to show leniency to pretrial defendants, at times setting initial bail too low and at times failing to revoke others who have reoffended.
Misdemeanor reform, said Martinez, “started out nobly but leaked into the felony area.”
While we agree that the reformist spirit of some Democratic felony judges has led to poor decisions, we’re frustrated that both candidates willfully conflate that phenomenon with the outcomes of court-ordered misdemeanor bail reform, which seem largely positive.
Both candidates insist on linking, with little evidence, the misdemeanor bail reform settlement with the city’s recent increase in homicides.
It’s clear why they’re doing it: to pin the rise in violent crime on the Democratic incumbent they hope to face in November, Lina Hidalgo, who signed off on the settlement. But it’s disingenuous, confusing to the public and frankly, a waste of time when the bigger factors — namely, a years-long courthouse backlog — need urgent attention.
Thankfully, the Republican candidates acknowledge that backlog and both say they would increase funding for law enforcement, and address District Attorney Kim Ogg’s ongoing requests for additional prosecutors. While Mealer said she would seek to grant her full request — part of Mealer’s repeated promises to “fully fund” law enforcement in general — Martinez proposed a more incremental approach to assess how effectively her office put those new funds to work.
Their views also overlapped on other issues, such as management of the flood bond and doing away with the new election administrator position that was at the center of the botched primary elections.
The decision for GOP primary runoff voters, then, comes down to whose profile inspires trust, confidence and enthusiasm, and who has the best chance of beating Hidalgo in the fall.
In Martinez’s favor is his long tenure in the community. As we wrote in February, he brings “four decades in the legal system, including as former chairman of the State Bar of Texas” and has honed broad knowledge of the region’s economy, infrastructure and other issues during his time on various boards, including the Greater Houston Partnership, the Port of Houston and the Houston Methodist Hospital System. We particularly appreciate Martinez’s commitment to boost the share of Harris County children with health insurance.
But some of his rhetoric, including accusations aimed at Mealer’s deceased grandfather, has been distasteful. His claim that “illegal(s) applying for asylum” were behind a spike in crime is the kind of reckless, inflammatory speech that has led the Republican Party away from the real work of governing.
Certainly, Mealer engages in occasional hyperbole about crime, telling us at one point that she couldn’t walk down her own street in the Heights, a claim we find dubious since she’s faced far more dangerous situations defusing bombs in Afghanistan. Overall, though, her tone seems more respectful, and more conducive to building relationships on Commissioners Court.
While we appreciate Martinez’s connections to Austin — he told us he’s known George P. Bush since he was born, for example — he’s also ended up in his own political drama while working as a lawyer for Houston Community College’s board. Given Harris County government’s culture of cronyism and weak ethics laws, we wouldn’t advise Republicans to replace a first-term Democratic incumbent who ran as an outsider reformer with a longtime Republican insider.
Mealer, whose outsider credentials rival Hidalgo’s when she bested popular Republican incumbent Ed Emmett four years ago, told us it was her relative lack of connections that made her the better fit. She pointed to the election issues and the recent IT “glitch” that led Harris County courts to release nearly 300 criminal defendants as instances where she claimed connected Democratic individuals ended up in roles they should not have. She also touted her “mission mindset” from her time in the military defusing bombs and her ability to stand up to scrutiny from her time in energy investment banking.
Given the overlap between the candidates, we considered yet another situation: the next Hurricane Harvey. Do Martinez’s connections outweigh Mealer’s emergency response capabilities developed under high pressure? We don’t think so.
Mealer is politically green, her delivery is rough, she can be easy to rile and she doesn’t know Harris County like Martinez. She’s also sharp, impressively nerdy with numbers, reasonable and authentic in a one-on-one conversation, and we think she’ll bring the energy needed to take on Harris County’s most popular elected official in the fall. We urge Republicans to back her in this runoff.
Similar in some ways, the two present a question of trust.