Former state judge leaves GOP, calls Trump racist
AUSTIN — A former Texas judge from Houston announced this week in a Facebook post that she is leaving the Republican Party, citing her disdain for President Donald Trump and what she called his racist ideology.
Elsa Alcala, a former Texas Court of Criminal Appeals judge who was appointed by Gov. Rick Perry in 2011, opted not to run for reelection at the end of 2018.
“It has taken me years to say this publicly but here I go. President Trump is the worst president in the history of this country,” Alcala wrote Monday. “Even accepting that Trump has had some successes (and I believe these are few), at his core, his ideology is racism. To me, nothing positive about him could absolve him of his rotten core.”
Prior to serving on the state’s highest criminal court, Alcala was a judge on the First District Court of Appeals, an intermediate appellate court in Houston, and the 338th District Court in Harris County, initially appointed by Gov. George W. Bush.
Alcala’s comments came in the midst of an explosive national debate over tweets Trump sent Sunday, in which he told four Democratic congresswomen to “go back” to the places from which they came.
The Democratic-controlled U.S. House on Tuesday voted, mostly on party lines, to condemn the attack as racist. Trump and fellow Republicans have defended the tweets, saying accusations of racism are unwarranted.
“Don’t tell me to go back where I came from,” Alcala said. “My relatives have been in this Texas area since before it was the USA, and I was born in the USA. … I spent 29 years in government service to help the people of our country, and I love our country and its people.”
Alcala wrote that she’d be voting in the Democratic primary for the first time in 20 years, adding that she hopes Democrats “rise to the occasion” and that “every polling station will be overwhelmed with voters.”
“What I know for sure is that we, as a country, are better than this,” she wrote. “To me, any of the viable Democratic presidential candidates are superior to the status quo.”