Poor Clay Robison must be one tired guy.
He oversees the combined Chronicle/Express-News Austin Bureau.
He moonlights as a (lefty) editorialist once a week.
And a legislative session just got underway.
So, perhaps that explains this snippet from his latest opinion column:
Let’s see, now. Most of the Republican judges in Harris County who were on the ballot in November were ousted in heavy, straight-ticket Democratic voting. A few years ago, Dallas voters booted a bunch of Republican judges in similar fashion.
So, Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston, files a bill to prohibit — guess what — straight ticket voting in judicial races.
It won’t pass.
But it reminds me that Republicans took over the courts in Harris County in 1994 in a similar straight ticket sweep that unseated many Democratic judges.
I don’t remember if any Democrat filed a similar bill then. If so, it obviously didn’t pass either.
That’s about the laziest bit of journalism to appear in the Chronicle since… well, since somebody sat down over Froot Loops and (mis)reported a KHOU story a few mornings ago.
Over at Lose an Eye, It’s a Sport, Cory Crow gives the matter a more comprehensive treatment. We’re betting he’s not going to hear from the newspaper’s invisible reader rep.
In any case, we’ll suggest once again that Robison shouldn’t be writing opinion columns and running the news bureau. Maybe if he stepped away from one of the jobs, he could actually do the other one well.
