THE FACEBOOK CROWD DEMANDS A LAWYER AND VOTER FOR JP 2-2

By Juan Montoya
It's getting to the point where you can open up some facebook sites and pretty much expect that someone will be stating unequivocally that Erin Hernandez Garcia – daughter of Cameron County Precinct 2 commissioner Ernie Hernandez – deserves to be the next justice of the peace simply because she is a lawyer and you're not.
The same voices reason (?) that the fact that candidate Yolanda Begum has voted in elections only recently disqualify her somehow from participating as a candidate.

It doesn't seem to mollify these critics that in the United States, the people, in their wisdom, have only elected lawyers to less than 5 percent of the total justice of the peace positions. As Carl Sandburg used to write, "The people, yes." 

After listening to their lamentations and looking over their predictable objections, it occurred to us that the Erin crowd was missing something very basic in their interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.

Just as this precious document guarantees the right to speak, worship, bear arms, and yes, vote, it also guarantees the right for every individual to choose whether he or she wants not to speak, not to worship, not to bear arms, and, yes, not to vote.

Are you willing to say that you voted for Abel Limas as a district judge or for Jim Solis as a state representative? Both, if you'll remember, exercised their right to vote themselves into positions that benefited them personally. Both violated the public trust. And yes, Virginia, both were lawyers.

Did that fact alone, that they were both lawyers and voted consistently qualify them as good, decent public servants, or even as good, decent human beings?

Not really.

How about Erin? She is n attorney. She knew that as a sitting magistrate with the city of Primera she could not get involved in endorsing any candidate. Yet, she was listed as the treasurer for city commissioner John Villarreal. She also knows that the Texas Local Government Code prohibits the county from having close relatives of a public official doing business with that governmental entity.

Yet, she was up to her neck in the manipulation of the vending machine contract with Cameron County that lists her mother, Norma, as the owner. Before that, it was Erin herself that was listed as the owner. And before that, when her dad was not a county commissioner, he was the owner.

Who are the Hernandezes trying to fool? The people? Allow Sandburg to edify you...

"This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.

There are men who can't be bought...

The people yes

The people will live on.

The learning and blundering people will live on.

They will be tricked and sold and again sold

And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,

The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,

You can't laugh off their capacity to take it.

The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas."