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Tarrant County Courthouse
More has been written about the Tarrant County Commissioners Court in the past two years than the past 25.
And — brace yourself — here comes more.
The burial customs of Eskimos and the practical uses of horse manure seemed more compelling topics, but here we are.
The court found itself the center of news coverage in June over the rushed mid-decade redistricting of the county’s precinct borders. It was led by Judge Tim O’Hare and two Republican colleagues on the court, Matt Krause and Manny Ramirez.
It was sold as an intentional packing of the court to ensure another “conservative” member on it. Under scrutiny by critics, O’Hare asserted that had the shoe been on the other foot and Democrats had the same opportunity, they would take it.
And it’s certainly true. Democrats gerrymandered in the U.S. Congress for decades. And at the county level, they have gerrymandered at every opportunity. One need only look east in Dallas County to see it.
It makes you wonder: What other “great” Democrat ideas might appear on a Tarrant County Commissioners Court Agenda?
Yes, gerrymandering is an unavoidable feature of partisan politics. It’s in the playbook of both parties.
However, whatever is said about Tarrant County’s redistricting — it took opponents seeming minutes to file a lawsuit alleging racial gerrymandering, which is illegal — it is decidedly not conservative.
Certainly not a conservative who supports tradition and continuity — redistricting is done every 10 years with updated census figures — and is opposed to government overreach and rightly skeptical of radical change. In this case, rushed radical change.
“A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling ‘Stop,’ at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it,” William F. Buckley Jr., the voice and brain of the 20th century conservative movement, said many moons ago.
As Calvin Coolidge once said of the job of a good legislator: “It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.”
A conservative, Buckley wrote, is one who persuades and engages people with ideas, not enforcing purity or isolating dissenters. That is an approach we have seen from the ideologues on the left. And it has failed spectacularly. One changes minds through clarity, wit, and logic, not rage or rigidity.
You don’t make believers as Mr. Rev. J. Frank Norris tried to do in another time, pounding his pulpit: You shall have no other gods before me, the Rev. J. Frank Norris.
Conservatism is supposed to be rooted in reality, not ideology. It is ideological purity, Buckley argued, that always leads to extremism. It was Buckley who denounced Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, in the early 1960s. Welch had once accused President Eisenhower of being a Communist agent. (We’ve actually heard something like that more recently.) Such conspiracy theories and rigid orthodoxy made the “movement look unserious and unfit to govern.”
This type of stuff is but one reason there literally is no Democratic Party in Tarrant County. They rarely appear serious. Moreover, Alisa Simmons, the commissioner targeted for defeat by the redistricting, at one point with all the grace of a royal wave, unfurled her hand and raised her middle finger at O’Hare.
Right there on the dais. Not exactly a masterclass in statesmanship. This is not a serious way to govern.
Allison Campolo — who is running for the Democratic Party chair in Tarrant County, presumably under the impression she can stitch shreds back together — appeared to speak at the meeting of the Commissioners Court. She vowed that Republican commissioners in support of the scheme would pay a heavy price for this alleged malfeasance by being voted out of office.
That, of course, is preposterous. Who needs redistricting to water down elections when you have the voter? No one devalues the right to vote quite like voters, who rarely bother to show up for nonpresidential elections.
Partisan politics is a necessary evil, but there can be no mistaking that it is poison in the well, particularly in local government. It is, flatly, not helpful.
In the lead-up to all of this, the Democratic members of the Fort Worth City Council — a nonpartisan body with partisan members — passed a resolution in opposition to the county’s planned measure, arguing that it was deliberately weakening the voting power of racial minorities.
There are already rumblings that the Republican Commissioners Court is eager and willing to not participate in economic development matters in council districts that supported the resolution, just as a matter of political retribution.
This is no way to live. And this is how big cities get in trouble.
Buckley had another piece of wise counsel: “Decent people should ignore politics, if only they could be confident that politics would ignore them.”