We recommend Joe Jaworski for Texas attorney general in Democratic primary

All of them say they can beat Attorney General Ken Paxton and restore integrity to an office that hasn’t seen it in seven years. They share many priorities, including protecting voting rights and women’s right to choose. Several vowed to use the office both legally and as a bully pulpit to advocate for legislative reforms including expansion of Medicaid.

We were intrigued by the candidacy of Fields, 56 and a former Republican judge who switched parties after he lost his bench in the 2018 Democratic sweep of Harris County. He was a respected jurist who bucked his own party in support of misdemeanor bail reform. But we asked him how Democratic voters could trust that he shared their values.

“I’ve always had them,” he told us, explaining that running as a Republican was the only way to win a bench in Harris County. While he hasn’t always been a Democrat, “I was always a Black man in America and certainly a Black man in the South,” he said. “I didn’t live in a vacuum. I lived in the real world. I did everything I could to help those people who were in communities of color, in communities of poverty, get out of our system.”

We like his vow to rein in the office that Paxton has politicized into a self-serving PR machine, and instead focus on the basics, including improving the child support payment system. We respect Fields’ 20 years of public service, including serving on the judicial conduct commission, and the relationships he’s built, including with GOP judges his office would face in court. He’s right that the “nuts and bolts work” requires conversations, not antagonism: “It’s not by poking people in the eye,” he said. “It’s by shaking their hand and reaching consensus.”

Merritt, 39, has a different vision. The former New Jersey teacher is a nationally known civil rights attorney focusing on police brutality and racial injustice. He represents the family of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man who was jogging near his home in Georgia in 2020 when he was chased down and killed by three white men, all of whom were convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Merritt, who says he moved to Dallas in 2015 so that he could bring cases before the conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, says he’d be a fighter in the state AG’s office and if Democrats want to win in November they need to energize the base, not play to the middle or nominate “disgruntled Republicans” such as Fields.

“Don’t present a centrist,” Merritt said. “Present a champion from the left.”

To which we say: How about a little of both? How about fight and collaboration? How about focus on the basics and on the big cases that will lead the way in national reforms? How about a lawyer with a Texas law license? (Merritt says he’s still pursuing one.)

We believe Jaworski would bring all those things as Texas AG, and he gets our enthusiastic endorsement. As a mediator, he knows how to solve problems and get consensus. As a former mayor, he’d bring back the respect that Texas used to have for local control before Gov. Greg Abbott began eroding it. Jaworski’s collaborative spirit, combined with innovative ideas, would go a long way to re-establishing the Texas attorney general as “the people’s lawyer.” As an aside, we like the guy’s style. On the endorsement page of his website, he doesn’t just feature big name politicians but ordinary voters of all stripes.

Jaworski says he’d waste no time turning “Paxton’s voter fraud” division into “Jaworski’s voter access division,” because, as he told the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, “you ought to be able to call the government when your voting rights are being impeded or damaged.” He’d also take small but important steps to champion the voting franchise, including sending letters to all Texas high schools reminding them of the Texas law that requires access for eligible seniors to register to vote.

He’d create a civil rights division at an agency that shamefully lacks one. On border security, rather than targeting individual immigrants and families, he’d go after the cartels that operate exploitative human smuggling operations, in part by funding special assistant U.S. attorneys across the border — a tactic he says was last used by then-AG John Cornyn.

Jaworski also plans to advocate for legalization of cannabis for recreational use in Texas, a priority that might seem minor, all things considered, but that carries weightier significance: Removing “wasteful, petty prosecution from the books,” he says, would “usher in long-overdue social and criminal justice reform.” We agree.

Perhaps most importantly, Jaworski commits to being accessible, transparent and ethical. We have reason to believe him — and not just because of his family ties. He demonstrated his own integrity as Galveston mayor, when he lost re-election in large part because he insisted on restoring public housing lost to Hurricane Ike by building permanent mixed-income developments rather than handing out vouchers for often substandard, far-flung apartments.

Brownsville attorney Rochelle Garza, 37, boasts that fighting spirit as well, as evidenced by her successful defense of abortion rights in the case of a 17-year-old immigration detainee who had escaped abuse in her home country. The former ACLU attorney’s focus on the rights of women and voters, and access to health care, is laudable, as is her bilingual campaign that speaks to many voters who haven’t seen themselves represented in past races for Texas AG.

Another candidate, Dallas attorney S. “TBone” Raynor, did not screen with us.

In the end, we believe Jaworski has the best chance of beating Paxton in the fall, and that such a victory wouldn’t just constitute legal justice, but the poetic kind as well.