It’s a curious second act for a former lawmaker who was last in the public eye on Election Day 2006 for cold-cocking his successor, three years after he wrapped up a stint in the Texas House punctuated with charges of ethics breaches.
But Rick Green has resurfaced, and he’s running for Texas Supreme Court. Don’t let his lack of a judicial background or minimal experience practicing law fool you: Green is a “constitutional scholar” with a law degree from the University of Texas. And in last week’s Republican primary, he clambered to the top of a six-candidate pile-up for the seat soon to be vacated by Harriet O’Neill, who decided not to seek another term. In a runoff on April 13, Green will face Fort Worth family district court judge Debra Lehrmann, who finished about 8,000 votes behind him. (The winner of that contest will face Democrat Jim Sharp in November.)
Green left the Legislature in 2002 after being narrowly defeated by Patrick Rose, D-Dripping Springs. Rose’s win came after Green’s extracurricular activity lobbying the Texas Department of Health on behalf of ephedra-maker Metabolife International prompted a criminal investigaton from the Travis County district attorney's office and his appearance in an early morning infomercial hawking FocusFactor, a dietary supplement plugged as a memory aid, from his Capitol office, attracted censure from colleagues and the media. (A Federal Trade Commission complaint about "unsubstantiated advertising claims" in the FocusFactor infomercial was settled by the company that marketed the product for $1 million in 2004).
While in the Legislature, Green also drew criticism for successfully pushing the Texas Parole Board to release a man who owed $400,000 to a company his father owned and, according to The Dallas Morning News, pressured lobbyists to donate to his Torch of Freedom Foundation, which sponsors the Patriot Academy, a program for young adults “to learn about America’s system of government from a Biblical worldview” — essentially a summer boot camp for politically minded conservative teens and 20-somethings.
After he left the House, Green made headlines again when witnesses reported they saw him deck Rose, allegedly over a campaign mailer where Rose had superimposed Green’s face over that of his then Republican challenger, Jim Neuhaus. Green recounts the incident in a self-published book: "It was the first real punch I had thrown since I was a kid, but it sent him to the ground." The Hays County sheriff’s office issued an all-points bulletin for Green’s arrest after the altercation, and he ultimately paid a fine and served six months probation on misdemeanor assault charges. In exchange for the fine and probation, Green received deferred adjudication, which means his record is now clear.
Green points out that “every single solitary time those things were brought up, they were dismissed” and says the allegations of wrongdoing in his past are “no big deal” to voters. Last Tuesday's primary results show that could be true.
The Rule of Law
Green is just the Jesus-baseball-and-Thomas-Jefferson sort of candidate who appeals to an electorate in a Tea-sipping mood, so his victory — by however small a margin — wasn't a huge jolt to the legal community, long used to the sway of external factors on down-ballot judicial races. But court watchers were not prepared for Green and Lehrmann — who, like her runoff opponent, has no appellate experience — to beat out four justices from Texas’ appellate courts who earned support from the likes of Tom Phillips, who served as chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court from 1988 to 2004, and Craig Enoch, who sat on the court from 1993 to 2003. With the exception of 14th Court of Appeals Justice Jeff Brown, who finished fifth, Green and Lehrmann also spent the least amount of money in their races.
Lehrmann has 22 years of experience on the district court bench, however, and there are a number of justices who have jumped from the lower court to the highest court — Phillips is one of them. And two current members of the court — the chief, Wallace Jefferson, and Justice Don Willett — had no judicial experience at all before donning their robes, though Jefferson was a highly regarded appellate attorney well known in legal circles, and Willett was a deputy Texas attorney general.
Green’s name, on the other hand, returns only one search result when entered into Westlaw, a widely used legal search engine of court opinions, law review articles and appellate briefs — and that’s an amicus brief from 2000 he signed along with several other lawmakers while he was in the Legislature.
It’s plain Green believes his lack of legal experience is an asset with voters: While he has steeped his campaign in familiar anti-judicial activism and pro-liberty themes, he limits mention of his lawyerly chops to his work giving speeches on “constitutional values” for WallBuilders, an activist group that proselytizes America’s Christian founding principles. “When you have judges from the same cookie-cutter judicial experience cloth, you end up with a branch that tends to be an entity unto its own rather than having some checks and balances and accountability to the other branches,” Green says. “We need people in every branch who are strongly familiar with the founding fathers’ philosophy and the principles that made America successful, and who will respect that formula and not try to change it.”
Green’s campaign also flaunts endorsements from Chuck Norris and Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, whom TLC’s 18 Kids and Counting! made famous for their fruitful marriage. When asked about what relevance the opinions of such right-wing celebrities have to the judicial process, he couches his answer in populism: “These are people who do not lightly give an endorsement. They do their homework and they do their research. Just like any other voter, they are citizens who care about the future of the state and the country. You don’t have to be an ivory tower elite or an attorney to know what kind of candidate you’d want to vote for or who you’d like to see in those positions.”
But the backing of Walker, Texas Ranger and nebulous nods toward the founding fathers may not be enough to carry Green in a primary runoff that doesn’t have a heavily contested gubernatorial race luring voters to the polls, especially when his narrow win the first time around has put members of the state bar on alert.
Enoch, the former justice, says that while he doesn’t know Green, he doesn’t believe the public will be ready to elect a justice without a background in the judiciary or with extensive legal experience: “Of course every judge comes to the bench [for the first time] not having judicial experience before, but I think the majority of people would expect someone seeking a position on the highest court of the state would have some previous judicial experience.”
Lehrmann said she received calls after the election from “members of the legal community" and "public citizens who are concerned” about Green’s candidacy. “Betty Crocker may be a great cook, but that doesn’t mean that she should be flying an airplane or performing surgery or sitting on the Supreme Court,” she says.
David Keltner, a former Texas appellate judge who now heads Kelly Hart and Hallman’s Fort Worth appellate practice and who will support Lehrmann in the runoff, says: “What I see is, he believes in the rule of law. Well, I understand that. I do, too. So do pretty much all judges. That doesn’t seem to make him unique.”
Green’s bid may also recall for some in the legal community an older (and liberal) generation of lawmakers-turned-justices, like Lloyd Doggett, Bob Gammage and Oscar Mauzy, accused of hijacking the court to advance agendas they couldn’t push through as legislators — a strategy “roundly rejected by the public,” according to Enoch. Gammage and the former Texas congressman and state senator Jack Hightower, who both left the court in 1995, were the last justices elected with any legislative experience.
Keltner, speaking generally of legislators who enter the judicial branch, says they often “will say, 'You know how I’m going to vote, because you’ve seen me vote on issues that way,'” to try “in code to tell people how they feel on certain issues. That has no place in the judiciary. Our founding fathers very much agreed that judges ought to be taken out of the general population and set aside to call things as they see them according to the rule of law, free from any influence or preconceived notion.”
Of course, Green’s past as a lawmaker gives him certain advantages, too. However it may contaminate judicial neutrality, what gives Keltner pause about judges who come from the legislative branch is attractive to some voters who want to know just what they’re getting. And Green's previous campaigns in more visible state legislative races give him a voter base and name recognition that could be a golden ticket in a usually obscure primary runoff.
Beyond the Court
The tenor of Green’s campaign, heavy on partisan ideology and light on discussion of judicial method, also raises the suspicion that he may have his sights set far beyond the Texas Supreme Court.
Green’s political drive struck documentary filmmaker Paul Stekler, who made a film about the 2002 Green/Rose race called Last Man Standing. Stekler says the lawmaker came across at the time as a shrewd player who was “very ambitious.” “I was very impressed with his political skills. He was young. He was attractive. He was very articulate about his beliefs,” he says. But in ways unusual for such a talent, Stekler notes, Green made mistakes.
Those mistakes —the Metabolife lobbying, the infomercial in his Capitol office, the letter to the parole board, the Patriot Academy fundraising, the public row with Rose — are perceived rather than proven lapses, but for some voters they could raise questions about Green’s judicial temperament. Or, if Green continues to exert the political prowess his win has shown he’s capable, he’ll be able to spin them as unfounded attacks stemming from liberal bias.
Lehrmann says she can’t speak to Green’s goals, but adds, “I’ve dedicated my entire professional life to contribute positively to the legal profession, to serve as a conscientious judge that consistently and fairly applies the law to the facts, and that’s it, period. I don’t have any aspirations to do anything else.”
So does Green think he’ll finish his political career on the court if elected? Ask him and he just laughs: “I have no idea.”
