In a county where Republican elected officials have all but gone extinct, a regional appellate court that most residents have never heard of is becoming one of the most hard-fought political battlegrounds.
Last election cycle, the San Antonio-based Fourth Court of Appeals elected three new Republican judges at a time when the local GOP had completely given up on trying to flip the county’s district court bench seats.
Now another big contest is shaping up for an opening in its chief justice position this year, drawing a Republican recruit who has already been elected twice to a statewide bench seat, Texas’ Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Bert Richardson.
“He was going to retire, and I’m saying, ‘Oh, I don’t think so — we’ve got this amazing job on the Fourth Court of Appeals,'” said Republican Party of Bexar County Chair Kris Coons. “We won the three [seats] there this last year … and now we have a very good shot [at the chief justice spot] too.”
Richardson is the only Republican running, and will go up against the winner of a heated Democratic primary that could ensure the GOP gains a seat next year no matter who wins the chief justice race.
Democrats are now in the minority on a court they once dominated, having lost three of their most experienced members in unsuccessful reelection bids last cycle.
Now Chief Justice Rebeca Martinez (D) is retiring instead of running for reelection in 2026 and the first Democrat to raise her hand for the job was newly elected Fourth Court of Appeals Justice Velia Meza (D-Place 2), whose move out of her current role would likely result in a Republican being appointed to her seat.
Meza was a district court judge in her second term when she defeated a fellow Democrat to win her seat in 2024. She has four years remaining on her current term after November, meaning Gov. Greg Abbott would need to choose a replacement, or she can continue serving in her existing role if she loses.
“It makes sense that somebody from inside the court would be the chief justice,” Meza said in December of her decision to run. “I naturally thought it would be the next most senior justice to run … and so when that didn’t happen, it was either I run … or someone from the outside is going to come in and run it.”
Other Democrats are more concerned about losing power on an important court, and don’t want to see Meza’s seat go to a Republican.
When Martinez announced plans to retire, Antonia “Toni” Arteaga, who is one of the county’s longest-serving district county judges, said her phone was ringing off the hook with people urging her to enter the Democratic primary.
“I think it’s really important for everyone to understand the dynamics,” Arteaga said of her Democratic primary race. “I think everybody should, whether you’re Democrat or Republican, look at your primary and look at the possible outcomes and how they will affect our community as a whole.”
A statewide shift
The unusual contest comes as Texas Republicans have put a major focus on reshaping the state’s regional appellate courts, which provide an intermediary review of rulings coming from the Democrat-dominated district courts before making their way up to the GOP-dominated statewide courts.
As one of the last bastions of Democratic power, the state’s Republican-led legislature has worked to weaken the courts’ authority by syphoning certain types of business cases, as well as cases involving statewide officials, over to a newly created statewide appeals court, where Abbott appoints the inaugural judges.
At the same time, GOP-aligned groups have also sunk big money into flipping seats on the regional appellate courts, including the San Antonio-based Fourth Court of Appeals.
Set up just across the street from the Bexar County Courthouse, the court takes cases from a much larger political subdivision that includes parts of the reliably red Hill Country, as well some of the traditionally blue border counties that have been trending toward Republicans in the era of President Donald Trump.
Unlike nearly every other bench seat with jurisdiction over Bexar County, that 32-county voting base has proven it can still swing between supporting Democrats and Republicans — drawing some unusual maneuvering from candidates who see an opportunity in its unusual politics.
A Bush appointee in the Paxton era
Richardson, for example, started his career in a different era of Republican politics.
He graduated from Judson High School, got his law degree from St. Mary’s University, worked as an Assistant District Attorney in Bexar County, and was later appointed to a state district court judgeship by then-Gov. George W. Bush, where he served for nearly a decade before losing to Democrat Ron Rangel in 2008.
Now the 69-year-old Stone Oak resident serves on Texas’ Court of Criminal Appeals, where Republicans have controlled all the seats for many years, but the court has undergone big changes since its members ruled four years ago that Attorney General Ken Paxton didn’t have broad authority to prosecute voter fraud.
Richardson was one of eight names on that decision, three of whom were up for reelection in 2024 and defeated by Paxton allies in the Republican primary.
Richardson told the San Antonio Report he stands by that ruling. But like the other Republican judge up in 2026 who supported it, he’s not sticking around to find out whether it’s still top-of-mind for GOP primary voters.
“I’m mindful of the perception of the case,” he said. “[But] that ruling has nothing to do with my decision, honestly. I will have been a judge at the end of this term for 22 years, and I’m eligible to retire. I was just trying to decide what to do.”
Richardson knew he was leaving the statewide role, but said that when people approached him about running for the chief justice position instead — an unusual move to a lower court — he decided it could be a good final race for his career.
“The reality is, right now, Bexar County is fairly blue, but the rural areas, as far as [the Fourth Court of Appeals] goes, tends to make those races much more competitive,” he said.
While four Republicans are fighting it out for his old seat on Texas’ Court of Criminal Appeals, Richardson is also unopposed in his primary.
“It’s closer to home. I don’t have to drive to Austin. I don’t have to campaign statewide,” he said of the decision.
A heated Democratic primary
In the years since Richardson was a state district judge, Democrats have steadily flipped every bench seat in Bexar County, to the extent that their elections are now also mostly fought out in the primary.
Last election cycle that reached a new level, however, when Meza challenged then-Fourth Court Justice Beth Watkins in the Democratic primary instead of Republican Justice Lori Valenzuela, who was also up for reelection to a seat on the same court.
Valenzuela was appointed by Abbott to fill a vacancy on the court in 2021, but cruised to a full six-year term unopposed.
Meza, an El Paso native, defended her move as smart politics. She said it was clear that the border counties were clearly moving toward Republicans that election cycle, but the GOP hadn’t fielded a candidate for Watkins’ seat, making it a more winnable race.
“Everyone at the border [was] saying they’re voting for Trump, and so I knew it was the right decision for me to run in a spot that didn’t have a Republican opponent,” she said.
Now in the minority on a court of Republicans, Meza said she’s not worried about the partisan divide. The justices work well together, she said, and they’re getting more work done than their predecessors.
“You can look at, not just the output, but the camaraderie, the collegiality,” she said. “I don’t know what happened in the court before I got there, … but we meet in person, we respect each other. … It’s that collaboration that makes this court what it is today.”
Given that dynamic, she said, it made sense for the current justices should choose a leader from among themselves to keep a good thing going.
“I don’t know that there’s any good reason anybody can point to that would be in the best interest of the Fourth Court for someone who’s never been a justice to come now and try to lead the whole court,” Meza said.
She’s now in a tough primary with Arteaga that will test whether Democrats agree with her ambitious approach.
Arteaga contends that a long career at the courthouse is typically good experience for higher office — though plenty of judicial candidates are running with very little of that these days.
“We just went into our fifth term, so that would be 20 years for me,” she said in a phone interview while she and her husband were driving west to campaign this week. “I’ve been asked to run for the [appellate] court before, but now we are empty-nesters.”
She dismissed concerns that someone from outside the court couldn’t be the chief justice, saying she’s spoken to many appellate justices about the role.
She’s also twice served as the president of the Texas Association of District Court Judges, which advocates for the courts’ needs at the legislature — something the chief justice is responsible for doing.
Like Meza, Arteaga has years left on her term, meaning Abbott would appoint a replacement if she wins, though that person would almost certainly be swept back out by a Democrat in the next election.
That was hardly the case when she was first elected, Arteaga said, and people didn’t really challenge incumbents from their own party. Now nearly all of Bexar County’s judges are Latina, and the path to elected office is changing.
“Things are really different than when I began,” she said. “I am the first woman to ever sit on the bench and I believe strongly in not being the last … but I’m stepping forward because I think it benefits the community. I wouldn’t be running if I thought that this would in any way undermine [that].”
