Harris County Republican slates are giving voters bad advice

Imagine being faced with eviction or fleeced by a tradesman. Or imagine that your dog had nipped a small child or that your sweetheart had always dreamed of a simple courthouse wedding.

On such occasions, you might find yourself explaining your situation to someone like Jeff Williams, a Republican who serves as justice of the peace for Precinct 5, Place 2, in Harris County. Williams, who took the bench in 2011, is seeking a third term in office — and he’ll get one, if he wins the Republican primary runoff on May 22. There is no Demo- cratic candidate in that precinct.

But Williams placed second in the March primary and might well lose the runoff to his opponent, Mike Wolfe. And so, on Thursday, Williams sent me an email asking whether he could explain his situation to me.

My column in that day’s paper concerned the mudslinging in the Republican primary runoff in the 2nd Congressional District and noted that some of the mud being slung at Dan Crenshaw was being slung by talk radio host Terry Lowry via his Linkletter.

“I too have been the subject and unlucky recipient of lies and half-truths, misrepresentations and mudslinging by the Linkletter,” Williams wrote. “If you'd like more information about it to set the record straight, I'd be thrilled to talk with you.”

I had never crossed paths with Williams prior to this, and it’s foolish to make assumptions about Republican judges in Harris County. Some of them are honorable and effective public servants. Others are puppets of party activists like Lowry and Steve Hotze. And it can be hard to tell the difference since they’re all Republicans, and most of them have generic-sounding

names like “Jeff Williams” or “Mike Wolfe.”

But after making a few inquiries, I concluded that Williams was in the public-servant category.

“All the sane people are supporting him,” one Republican source told me.

He explained that Harris County’s notorious slates are supporting Williams’ challenger — despite the fact that Wolfe is not a lawyer and has no legal experience — because Williams, in his capacity as justice of the peace, has married all couples who request his services and can present him with a valid marriage license.

That’s among the reasons the Houston Chronicle endorsed Williams in February. The editorial board also added a note of caution about Wolfe, who serves on the Harris County Department of Education’s board of trustees.

“Wolfe is generally treated as an embarrassment within local governance and should be kept as far as possible from the levers of power in Harris County,” the editorial board noted.

The Linkletter, by contrast, endorsed Wolfe, who proudly listed the endorsement in a fullpage ad he placed in the special edition of the Linkletter published shortly before this year’s Republican primary.

That edition of the Linkletter also included a parenthetical about Williams on its slate of endorsements, accusing him of asking Harris County Commissioner Steve Radack for a “temporary chapel for (gay) weddings after the Harvey flood.”

A follow-up edition of the Linkletter included a guest editorial about the Williams vs. Wolfe runoff by a local plaintiff ’s lawyer, Eric Dick.

“Mr. Williams is inhumane and an utter embarrassment to the party,” Dick wrote, denouncing his handling of cases in the courtroom.

Dick, in an interview Friday, would not provide any evidence of the mistreatment he described in the guest editorial, saying only that he had gotten the information from an attorney whose name he would not provide.

I explained to Dick that it would be unreasonable for me to report the unnamed attorney’s allegations without at least hearing them for myself.

“What you’re trying to do is to spin the truth because you don’t like it,” Dick retorted.

“On what basis are you making that assumption about me?” I asked.

“How you’re acting,” he said.

Dick, who serves as vice chair of HCDE’s board of trustees, declined to answer my follow-up question about whether there are any circumstances under which it might, in theory, be acceptable for a journalist to ask questions.

Radack, however, confirmed that Williams had never asked him to build a wedding chapel in the temporary Precinct 5 courthouse, which was set up after Hurricane Harvey in a building that normally hosts a Peter Piper Pizza.

“Engineering was in charge of finding him a location for his marriages or a conference room or whatever he was asking for,” Radack said.

A tricky thing about the Linkletter and Harris County’s other notorious slates is that they sometimes endorse a reasonable Republican candidate despite themselves.

The Williams vs. Wolfe runoff, however, is not one of those cases. So if you’re among the hundreds of thousands of Texans who live in Precinct 5 of Harris County, I encourage you to vote in the Republican primary runoff if you’re eligible to do so.

You might find yourself in “the people’s court” someday. And imagine how you’d feel if you had to explain your situation to someone like Wolfe, who isn’t even a lawyer and would, as a justice of the peace, be empowered to rule against you for any reason he — or Lowry — might think he should.

“I was elected to follow the law, and to protect rights,” said Williams, the incumbent — and, in this context, the better choice.