County attorney won’t be pushed around by state leaders

You could almost get the impression that state leaders have an issue with Harris County.

The mask mandate that County

Judge Lina Hidalgo attempted to put in place after COVID-19 reached the region two years ago, for example, was swiftly ensnarled by an executive order from Gov. Greg Abbott. Drive-thru voting, one of the popular innovations pioneered in the 2020 election — was banned by law in 2021, for no good reason. Harvey funds? Forget about it, according to the General Land Office.

“They are very much pushing us around,” said Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee on

Thursday. “I definitely didn’t come here to roll over and just take that. I’m a litigator.”

Those may sound like fighting words because they are. Since being elected in 2020, Menefee has shown that he’s eager to be in the fray — and in the courtroom, on behalf of the county.

“People get sued. It happens all the time,” Menefee said, explaining that he personally doesn’t find such proceedings stressful. “And, you know, some of the great civil rights victories in this country started in the courtroom. You don’t get a Voting Rights Act, or a Civil Rights Act, without the lawsuits that laid the foundation for why there needed to be change in this country.”

This is a bracing attitude from the county attorney, and one which points to a potentially interesting turn in the state’s ongoing war against local control, particularly in the state’s large, Democratic-led counties.

The office is normally an obscure one, and poorly understood. Menefee says he sometimes has to explain that he’s not the district attorney — that would be Kim Ogg, also a Democrat — or an attorney, small “a,” in Harris County.

On the campaign trail in 2020, he would explain to voters that the job has three responsibilities: to be the chief civil attorney for the county, offering legal advice and representation to county officials and agencies — but also to be “a sword,” when possible,

and “a shield,” when necessary.

And so, after being elected in 2020, Menefee began working on a fair-chance hiring policy for the county, under which applicants for county jobs won’t be asked about their criminal history at the outset of the hiring process; this proposal was approved by commissioners court in January. On Thursday, when we met, he was visibly excited about a newly announced summer legal academy that his office is launching this year for high school students who someday might be interested in becoming attorneys.

But many days, Menefee said, he finds himself playing defense in response to state action: that’s the “shield” function of the office he described.

A vivid illustration came last month, when Gov. Greg Abbott, armed with a nonbinding opinion from Attorney General Ken Paxton, directed the state Department of Family Protective Services to report and investigate Texas parents who might help their transgender children access gender-affirming health care — a form of child abuse, according to the two Republicans.

Menefee was underwhelmed by the directive, and the nonbinding opinion that served as a fig leaf for it. And so, after several hours of reviewing the laws at hand, Menefee announced that his office simply wouldn’t prosecute such investigations in Harris County.

He was the first locally elected official in Texas to take such a stance, but a number of others, mostly in other large counties, put out similar statements in subsequent days. The state’s policy is also now being challenged in court, by Lambda Legal and the ACLU. A district court judge in Travis County, after hearing arguments in the case on Friday, halted such investigations for the time being. (Paxton has appealed the injunction.)

“Obviously, there’s legal implications from what we did,” Menefee said. “But, also, it’s sending a signal to these families: hey, you don’t have to be hiding in the shadows; your entire government is not against you.”

Menefee was raised in a Coast Guard family. Both parents joined the service after “extremely poor” upbringings, in San Antonio in his mother’s case, and in Houston’s Fifth Ward for his father.

One of his earliest political memories came in third grade, when a teacher straw-polled the children about their preferences in the 1996 presidential elections. Seeing a sea of little hands shoot up for Bill Clinton, Menefee decided to buck the trend and be a Bob Dole guy.

“That’s when I came out as a Republican,” joked Menefee, who is a Democrat. He was elected by a comfortable margin in November 2020 against Republican John Nation, after winning 50.45 percent of the vote in a three-way Democratic primary against incumbent Vince Ryan and environmental lawyer Ben Rose.

In addition to being the first African American to serve as Harris County attorney, Menefee, who took office at age 32, is the youngest person to hold the post. But one of his role models for the job, he pointed out, was similarly youthful when he took the office.

“Right there,” Menefee said, pointing behind me.

I swiveled and saw a portrait of a mustachioed man with solemn eyes. This was Mike Driscoll, Menefee explained, who after being elected Harris County attorney at age 34 in the early 1980s proved himself to be “a firebrand,” “a lawyer’s lawyer,” and unafraid of a fight, whether with the state or with other players in Harris County. In fact, he continued, it was Driscoll who helped affirm the independent powers of the county attorney’s office in 1985’s Driscoll v. Harris County Commissioners Court.

Menefee isn’t surprised that those powers are being tested.

“One of the earliest core principles of modern day conservatism is that you govern at the lowest level possible, right?” he said, adding dryly: “But of course, when people who look differently start running those institutions, you got to push back. So I suspect you’re going to see a whole lot more of it.”

It’s not all strife, to be clear. The Harris County Attorney’s Office partnered with the state Attorney General’s Office on last year’s opioid settlement, for one thing. But still.

There’ll be plenty to litigate about going forward, Menefee anticipates.

“I’m fine with us continuing to have these fights in court. It’s no skin off my back,” he said. “I’m not worried about it at all.”

Perhaps it’s the state leaders who should worry.