Here are excerpts from recent editorials in Texas newspapers:
Beaumont Enterprise. Feb. 12, 2017.
Jefferson County Judge Jeff Branick is the latest local official to switch political parties, continuing a small but significant trend that is headed in only one direction. Branick said he is leaving the Democratic Party because he has “become increasingly uncomfortable with (its) stance on a number of issues such that I can no longer count myself among its membership.” He mentioned regulatory burdens for major projects, national security concerns, the exclusion of religion from the “public square” and the impact of illegal immigration.
County Democrats have to be embarrassed by these defections, but don’t write their obituary yet. They still hold the majority of Jefferson County offices, and in November pulled off some impressive victories for sheriff and several judgeships. Switches like this don’t make Democrats the anti-values party. They have countless patriotic and principled members too.
Yet Branick’s flip, and the intense partisanship that rules Austin and Washington, raise another point about the limits of labels.
City councils and school boards in Southeast Texas (and the entire state, of course) are non-partisan, and they function pretty well.
The Beaumont Independent School District’s board of managers appointed by the Texas Education Commissioner come from diverse backgrounds, and they have turned around a school district that was on the verge of chaos. The Beaumont City Council contains some members who disagree with each other regularly and enthusiastically, but they get the job done. These board aren’t entangled with all the other issues that come with being a D or an R. Many voters know them personally and vote for (or against) them for reasons that have nothing to do with partisanship.
The county commissioners court can be added to that list even though its members are officially Republican or Democrat. Partisan issues almost never arise - because they’re irrelevant. The black Democratic woman who beat a white Republican man is running the sheriff’s department pretty much like he would have - and you probably could say the same if the winners were reversed. There is no Democratic way to patch a street or Republican way to clear a drainage ditch. The focus is on performance, as it should be.
One more point: Branick’s letter explaining his switch closed with a heartfelt appeal to his Democratic supporters to remain his friends and a pledge that they will “continue to be treated with dignity, respect and fairness in my courtroom.” That kind of decency and civility used to be common in Austin and Washington. We’d all be better off if it returned.
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Midland Reporter-Telegram. Feb. 14, 2017.
The Texas Association of REALTORS wants the Texas Legislature to address a “hidden property tax.”
A mailer the association is sending to Texans says property values seem to be increasing every year, which is “good for building personal wealth.” The mailer then attacks local elected officials that the mailer claims “vilify increased appraisal values” but don’t lower tax rates to offset higher property values.
The Texas Association of REALTORS wants Texans to let legislators know they are concerned about the “unfair Hidden Property Tax” and that “higher property values should not be an automatic tax increase for property owners.”
The mailer asks for Texans to send a card - part of the mailer - to legislators that calls for the consideration of “all bills that would eliminate the “Hidden Property Tax” and ensure more transparency and honesty when tax rates are adopted at the local level.”
In our view, the mailer attempts to call for unnecessary government, because the only thing Midlanders need to understand their tax situation is a subscription to the Reporter-Telegram - print or our e-edition - or have an interest in our website, mrt.com, around the time budget season is in full effect.
Newspapers remain the best way to keep up with government, certainly better than government itself. And the Reporter-Telegram has helped Midlanders understand that government entities such as the city of Midland, Midland County, the junior college district and hospital district have always been in control of the tax collections they claim from residents. They know the valuations before any rate is set. They determine their budgets. Governing boards are in total control.
It was this newspaper that said members of the community should take tax rate declines in our community with a grain of salt. It was the newspaper that has been critical of those who failed to recognize that valuations have been on the rise for the better part of two decades, leaving rates to go nowhere but down.
If you receive the mailer calling for legislators to bring more transparency to local government’s tax situation and want to participate, by all means do so. But know that the information is already there for all residents of our community to see. The Reporter-Telegram will continue to have things covered come budget season for those who are actually concerned about it.
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San Antonio Express-News. Feb. 14, 2017.
There is some magical thinking out there that somehow this region can continue to grow without the use of toll roads.
Our roads on the fast-growing North Side are pure gridlock, which will only be exacerbated with the addition of 1.1 million more people in Bexar County over the next 25 years. Tolls are simply one more tool to help address that gridlock and growth. Other alternatives include using public transportation, bike commuting, carpooling and developing light rail. We support them all.
The Alamo Area Metropolitan Planning Organization’s recent vote to prioritize funding for toll roads on a 23-mile stretch of Loop 1604 was absolutely the right thing to do.
Bexar County officials, and those in outlying exurban counties, would have been foolish to not include tolls in a group of 12 priority projects for the region. The 1604 project is expected to cost $882 million, but tolls would reduce that cost to taxpayers to $326 million.
The angst over toll roads is nonsensical and reactionary. A toll does not raise your taxes - but it does reflect that your taxes are not covering the true cost of our transportation needs.
A toll is a user fee. If you want to use a road to speed up your commute, then you can pay for that opportunity. But you can always choose to go a different route, and you will benefit from those drivers who do opt for tolls.
Those who find tolls unpalatable will undoubtedly voice their frustrations and concerns - as they have in the past. But rather than railing against the prospect of toll roads here, ignoring the dire state of congestion, toll opponents should really advocate for an increase in the gas tax.
It hasn’t been raised since 1991, when it went to 20 cents a gallon. Ann Richards was governor. The minimum wage was $4.25 an hour. Thanks to inflation, that 20 cents doesn’t go near as far as it used to, even though Texas’ population has surged from 17.4 million to 26 million.
The gas tax isn’t a perfect vehicle to fund transportation. Improved fuel economy creates diminishing returns, and electric vehicles don’t pay anything. But it is a proven funding option, sorely in need of an increase. It would certainly help mitigate the need for toll roads.
But state lawmakers have shown zero interest in raising the gas tax, which is exactly why toll roads need to be on the table.
The goal here is to keep people moving. Toll roads help make that happen. We only slow ourselves down when we frame the issue any other way.
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Houston Chronicle. Feb. 14, 2017.
Former Supreme Court Justice David Souter was something of a recluse even during his years on the court, and he’s been even more reclusive since he retired from the bench nine years ago. In 2012, however, he emerged from his cabin in the New Hampshire woods and offered observations about the woeful state of civic knowledge in this nation. Five years later those words seem prescient as we plunge forward into the Trumpian era. They also serve as a warning - and as motivation for pursuing efforts to restore robust, informed and engaged self-governance.
Souter, a George H.W. Bush appointee, spoke about “civic ignorance” at the University of New Hampshire School of Law. MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow resurrected his remarks last fall, shortly before the November election.
“I don’t worry about our losing our republican government in the United States because I’m afraid of a foreign invasion,” the former jurist said. “I don’t worry about it because I think there is going to be a coup by the military, as has happened in some other places. What I worry about is when problems are not addressed, people will not know who is responsible. And when the problems get bad enough, as they might do, for example, with another serious terrorist attack, as they might do with another financial meltdown, some one person will come forward and say, ’Give me total power, and I will solve this problem.’”
Souter’s words serve as a portent for Candidate Trump’s chilling statement in his nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in July: “I alone can fix it.”
A populace unaware of this nation’s civic traditions as embodied in the Constitution, ignorant of the basic mechanics of governing and intolerant of tedious and mundane democratic processes leaves itself susceptible to a figure with little regard for democratic norms. We saw intimations of that in November.
We Texans are not immune. A state that ranks near the bottom on surveys of voting and other forms of civic participation, a state that tolerates a high public official more interested in transgender-targeted bathroom bills than making sure that our schools are well funded, would seem particularly vulnerable to the blandishments of a blustering president with neither knowledge of nor respect for how government works in a self-governing nation. Lacking in civic education, we’re more willing to tolerate our new president’s vilification of opponents, his penchant for false statements, his praise for authoritarian regimes abroad.
Our over-burdened public schools are the arena for civic education. In fact, civic education is a core founding mission, as our Founding Fathers were acutely aware.
Civic education shouldn’t be confused with patriotic pablum. It’s not partisan propaganda. It’s an engagement with the basic workings of democracy, an engagement as practical and thorough as a well-taught class in computer programming or engineering technology.
A nation that skimps on teaching the skills, habits and traditions of civic life endangers itself. In Souter’s words, “That is the way democracy dies.”
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The Dallas Morning News. Feb. 14, 2017.
We all must respect the sanctity of the right to vote.
To that end, we have no bone to pick with the criminal justice system holding anyone accountable for voting illegally, whether the person cast a fraudulent ballot mistakenly or deliberately.
But we do take issue with the way Tarrant County District Attorney Sharen Wilson and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton are treating Rosa Maria Ortega. She was recently sentenced to eight years in prison and fined $5,000 on each of two counts of illegal voting.
This is an embarrassing and costly miscarriage of justice. It shouldn’t be allowed to stand.
Ortega, mind you, wasn’t involved in some elaborate plot to sway an election, nor was she scheming to destroy the fabric of our democracy. As a legal permanent resident of the United States, she wasn’t qualified to vote at all; she clearly violated the law, and for that, she deserves to be counseled and punished.
Yet, enabling a jury to sentence this woman - a divorced mother of four children who has been in the country since she was an infant - to eight years in prison for what arguably was a naïve interpretation of election laws ranks as a gross injustice.
The punishment doesn’t fit the crime. And taxpayers will be forced to shell out about $22,495 a year to house her. For what?
Worse still is the fact that top Texas officials are gloating over the sanctions. That strongly suggests that the powers that be chose to make an “example” out of Ortega, turning her into a poster child for unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud - Example A in a bitter partisan fight over stricter voter ID laws.
We simply can’t ignore or dismiss the political climate in which this miscarriage of justice occurred.
President Donald Trump has tried to stir up the masses with baseless claims about millions of illegal voters who allegedly cast their November ballot for Democrat Hillary Clinton and cost him the popular vote.
Republicans, in a war being driven in Texas by Paxton, are using these spurious suppositions to fuel their campaigns for more restrictive voting laws.
Ortega, 37, evidently got caught up in this political web, which may explain why she’s being treated like a violent felon.
The Grand Prairie woman was found guilty of voting in Dallas County in the 2012 general election and the 2014 Republican primary runoff. She said she cast her ballots for Mitt Romney for president and, ironically, Paxton in his bid for attorney general. Go figure.
It’s disheartening to learn that once Ortega rejected a plea deal last summer for two years’ probation because it probably would’ve led to her deportation, prosecutors dropped the hammer on her.
Her attorney told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that he’d worked with Paxton’s office in recent weeks to get the case dismissed in exchange for Ortega testifying before the Legislature about the voting process. Reports said Wilson, the DA, nixed the deal, which she denies. But for some reason, it fell through.
And that’s too bad, because it would have been a fairer and more practical outcome for all involved.
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