Attorney Warren Norred said when he saw State Senator Beverly Powell avoiding a GOP voter integrity bill by fleeing to Washington, D.C. last summer on a private jet with some 50 other Texas Democrats, he decided to do something about it.
“It was too much,” he said. “It had to be met.”
The North Texas Republican is gunning to replace Powell, a Democrat, as District 10’s state senator.
“The Republican party didn’t have anybody running against the incumbent and we didn’t know what the boundaries of the district would look like,” Norred told The Dallas Express. “I didn’t really care if the lines changed or not. I think it’s winnable without the lines changing.”
If elected, Norred will represent eight counties, including Tarrant, Johnson, Parker, Palo Pinto, Shackleford, Calhoun, Stephens, and Brown. In the March 1 primary, Phil King of Weatherford is his opponent.
“I’ve represented and worked with him for more than a decade,” Norred said in an interview. “He’s a lawyer. I’m a lawyer. I’m also an engineer.”
Norred made the comments at a Moms for Liberty presentation of the film Mind Polluters at the American Experience Museum in Irving, Texas, last week.
Moms for Liberty is a national grassroots organization of mothers who advocate for parental rights.
This isn’t Norred’s first bid at running for office. He once campaigned for a seat on the State Board of Education (SBOE).
“Many years ago, I lost in the primary to Pat Hardy,” he said. “The teaching education establishment hated me.”
Norred also founded the Arlington Classics Academy, a charter school with 1,500 kids, rated among the top schools in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
“The SBOE is far too restrictive in telling people that they can’t open charter schools,” he said. “They focus on all the wrong things and a general problem is that people will grade charter schools based on some criteria that they want because they don’t recognize parents as the ultimate arbiter of the education their kids are getting. They’ll look at a charter school in a hard part of town and say that school’s not doing very well while ignoring the fact they’re doing better than the schools around them.”
Last year, SBOE members voted to reject four of seven charter school applications recommended by the Texas Education Agency (TEA).
“What the legislature should do and SBOE should do is recognize that the parents are the authorities and not bonehead ‘educrats’ who want to make their own decisions on how they grade schools,” he said.
Education administrators are often referred to as “educrats”.
“Education is a big deal to me,” Norred said. “The education system is half the budget of Texas and it needs to be recalibrated.”
In addition to education, Norred is passionate about the border, the budget, property taxes, election integrity, and medical freedom.
“I filed all of the mask lawsuits in the state of Texas,” he added. “They are all my cases. One started off not my case, but then I had to get involved to fix it. Crowley, Austin, Richardson, Dallas, Elgin, and El Paso ISD. Those are all my cases. They are making their way through the court system.”