"She said, well, I'm sorry, it's murder, and that's that," said Joy Mankoff, founder of a local women's political action network. "There was no room for any discussion."
Encouragingly, Miers played a leading role in crafting a settlement agreement in a lawsuit that accused Dallas of perpetuating segregated housing.
Among other things, the agreement forced the city to demolish or renovate dilapidated minority-occupied housing projects and increase the supply of low-income housing in more affluent, white suburban neighborhoods. Miers subsequently voted to make it easier to prove housing discrimination cases by lowering the burden of proof.
Miers’ political stance on abortion seems clear, and she joined a unanimous Council vote to ask Congress to amend the Constitution to ban flag burning. Still, Miers’ short tenure on the Council revealed few firm political convictions.
For the most part, Miers operated in the background, leaving her colleagues perplexed about her political ideology. She also had a tendency to switch stances on critical issues, a trait supporters said showed her thoughtfulness but that critics labeled indecision.
She won friends across the political spectrum.
If Miers rarely pushed her own agenda, she readily plunged into the middle of the biggest civil rights controversies of the day, winning the respect of council members such as Diane Ragsdale, a firebrand African American whom many in the white establishment loved to hate. "Early on, Harriet asked me what could she do to improve conditions for my constituents," Ragsdale said. "She was always about fairness."
Miers didn’t enjoy the experience.
She left elected office of her own choosing after one term, lamenting to a local reporter that "decisions are more political" than an effort to reach the "right result."
We still need to know a great deal more about Miers, but the WaPo article provides valuable information about her career on the Dallas City Council. Whether her political views would translate into a zeal to replace well-established precedent is a question the Judiciary Committee will need to explore.
