Who Filed Yesterday & Highlights

Click this link to go to the local party's website and see all the filings as of yesterday. George Ybarra and Lily Limón, under the leadership of Chairwoman Holguin have done a great job of keeping information updated.

Special shout out to George, Lily, and Ayle Sarinana for working well on such a hectic day. Having to get stuff done with me, Eddie Holguin, and Pee Wee in the room being loud and obnoxious could not have been easy. Especially me and Eddie, we were laughing and joking all day. But everyone got their work done despite us distractions. 

Except Eddie Holguin. He had one job to do and failed!

So here are some quick highlights. 

Embattled Judge Mike Herrera, who is currently a District Court Judge, filed to run for a County Court. Why take a step down on the food chain? Mostly because it doesn't affect him in any way but positive. 

Frankly, this and two other judicial filings are really important news stories but lets be honest, everyone more interested in the train wreck. 

Herrera is one of the judges that was disciplined for his conduct related to his own divorce proceeding being in his court, so its really ballsy that he has the nerve to ask voters for another job. But he can literally have is cake and eat it too. District Court judges are basically the only elected officials that the Resign to Run rule doesn't apply to, so he's got nothing to lose. 

Which is complete bullshit. 

But the reason he is doing it is fairly transparent. The vato wants to draw another tax payer funded retirement check. He's a candidate now, the media should be shoving a mic in his face and asking about it. 

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The other embattled judge in the courthouse right now is Judge Luis Aguilar. Lawyers smell blood in the water and Aguilar now has 3 opponents. Roberto Ramos, Felix Castanon, and Selena Solis have all filed as of yesterday. Two candidates, Castanon and Solis both filed within the last 30 minutes of the deadline. 

Aguilar is the most vulnerable judge on the ballot right now, but only to the extent that his opponents have the courage to raise his record. One candidate did nothing with it, which is why I suspect the other two jumped into he race. They have to be willing to make an issue of it and while his reprimand is really long and most voters will never see it or go through it, there are several very damaging quotes in the document. The timing of its release was devastating for Aguilar's reelection chances. 

But again, this is all theoretical. If it doesn't get leveraged or is leveraged last minute and sloppily like Alyssa Perez did it last time, he's gonna win. 

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Speaking of Alyssa Perez, she filed within the last hour of the deadline as well to run for her uncle GG's seat. She will face Judge Monique Velarde in the primary for that seat. Perez is going to have the support of the law enforcement unions because she's their lawyer. They showed up with her when she filed yesterday. They also backed her and funded her when she lost to Luis Aguilar last election. 

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GG didn't file! One of the most shocking developments was that Gonzalez Garcia did not file for reelection. A rumor started last week that he was not going to file for his seat and instead file to run against Justice Gina Palafox, and Alyssa Perez would file for his seat, I guess to keep it in the family so to speak. I reached out to Perez before the filing deadline to confirm or deny and she refused to answer, so I took that as confirmation.

But GG never filed for the Court of Appeals race. I have a theory as to why. Since the both of them (GG and Perez) were trying to be cute and make this a last minute thing, which would help neither of them in any case, GG was supposed to file for the appellate seat but it is a multi-county race. For those you have to file in Austin. He may not of known that until it was too late. By the time Perez was filing it was already after 6pm in Austin, so even if GG was there, his deadline was really 5pm.

So he either made the biggest screw up in recent political memory, or he chose the world's worst retirement announcement. 

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Norma Chavez filed for congress. You know that already. But I'll do a comprehensive piece on it later today.