Houston's 'Hidden Tax' of Trauma (Feat. Christian Menefee)

The largest county in Texas has undergone a sea change in political leadership in recent years, and the elected officials' focus—like everyone else in the state—has turned to outages last week that affected millions of people, killed dozens and launched investigations into what went wrong. “Folks are overwhelmed, and there's a big element of trauma," Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee, who became the top civil lawyer here in November, noted in the latest episode of Law&Crime's podcast "Objections." In a city beset by multiple 500-year weather events within the past half-decade, the Houston Chronicle called trauma the Bayou City's hidden tax, and Menefee agrees, noting it's a price paid more acutely by the poor and communities of color. Part of a new movement of younger, more diverse and progressive leaders, Menefee—the first African-American Harris County Attorney—sounds off on environmental justice and his just-launched civil investigation into regulators previously obscure outside the Lone Star State: the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) and Public Utility Commission (PUC). University of Texas Professor David Spence unpacks the complicated history of Texas's independent energy grid. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Om Podcasten

Always Relevant, Never Hearsay, Sometimes Argumentative. In each episode of Objections, Adam Klasfeld navigates listeners through the top legal stories of the week with experts in a straightforward, analytical and factual manner. Klasfeld is a senior investigative reporter and editor for Law&Crime. Adam has reported on every corner of the legal system for more than a decade, with datelines from federal courts, state courts, the United Nations, Guantánamo Bay, the Ecuadorean Amazon, and a court-martial inside a military base near NSA headquarters.