I want to thank subscribers and those of you sharing Texas to the World. I’ve been greatly encouraged by the readership of this weekly post, and hope it continues to grow. I’ve found myself spending a bit of time concentrating on the Texas governor and his failure to lead in a time of crisis, but I hope to turn to other subjects when we’ve put a few more guardrails up around our politicians. - JM
“Texas is a den of thieves – a rendezvous of rascals for all the continent.” – Horace Greeley, 1850.
Greg Abbott and the Texas Taliban are on the march. They are coming in from the far-right wing to capture the rights of women to choose, control businesses, put the health of your children at risk, and take away management of local government as they transform the state into Texghanistan. Abbott sits in Austin like a grand mullah and issues edicts that put him in direct conflict with the people he was elected to serve. He is almost at war with a state he is supposed to lead.
This is not a tortured analogy or dark humor. As the Taliban take over provincial capitals in Afghanistan, the fate of women under the radical Islamist regime becomes terrifying. When the terrorists had previous control, women were not allowed in public without men, windows in homes had to be painted black to keep men from looking in and seeing them; they were beheaded and shot for crimes like carrying their sick children to a doctor without male accompaniment.
Abbott and the Trumpublicans have already passed laws that will cost women their lives. Exactly what is the legal and cultural distance between putting a $10,000 bounty on the heads of women getting an abortion and the Taliban rules that require women to seek the permission of males for almost everything? Abbott pushed the Texas legislature to pass a new law that allows anyone to sue a woman who gets an abortion after six weeks. The “heartbeat” bill only requires the group of cells that will become the heart to show activity of growth, which often happens well before a woman even knows she is pregnant.
The most onerous part of the abortion restriction bill is the money it offers to anyone who sues a woman for getting the procedure, or even an individual who might help her deal with a problem pregnancy. The plaintiff doesn’t need to know the woman or anyone who provided her the service or the assistance. They can simply file suit against the female, or their friend or counselor or doctor or physician’s assistant for facilitating the abortion. This means a religious advisor or even a taxi driver taking the woman to a clinic have legal exposure to the plaintiffs’ claims. If the suit is won, and it is proved the woman got an abortion after six weeks, the plaintiff gets $10,000. Greg Abbott and the Texas legislature have turned the entire conservative state into snitches on women who are dealing with what is often the most difficult and emotional decision in their lives.
There is no subtle or nuanced way to describe what is being done by the Texas governor. He is killing people, including children, with executive orders, which amount to edicts and continue to turn Texas into a failed state. Instead of dealing with the problems confronting Texans, the governor is focused on deadly gestures that appeal to the radical primary base that will again give him his party’s nomination. In the process of appeasing the Trumpublicans and Texas Taliban, he is ruining lives and the cultural image and economic potential of the state. Every day he seems to pick a new battle with his citizens.
His most absurd order to date might be his anti-mask and vaccine mandate that prohibits schools, counties, and state government institutions from ordering the wearing of masks, or the requirement of a vaccine, to protect from spreading the Covid virus. In response, he is being sued by officials in the state’s four major cities, and school districts, who are all defying his illogical choice. Abbott has used his disaster declaration to authorize the bans, but counties and schools are questioning whether that gives him to power to overrule ordinances and regulations at the local level. Harris County, the state’s largest and most populous, has filed suit and expects to end up arguing the case in the Texas Supreme Court. Fort Bend County was granted a restraining order against the governor because a local judge felt protective measures were needed in public schools and county buildings and officials should have the authority to act to stop the spread of the virus.
Abbott’s argument, more than a bit specious, is that it’s time for personal responsibility and not rules. He connects mask and vaccine requirements to liberty, which is useless when you are dead. While the governor postures and preens for the right wing of his party, people die. His rhetoric against ordering mask usage and stopping businesses and institutions from requiring vaccines is having deadly consequences. According to the Texas Tribune, 8,787 Texans had died from the virus since early February, and only 43 of them had been fully vaccinated. Of those 43, 75 percent had underlying conditions that placed them at risk and 95 percent were white males over the age of 60. Overall figures show that 99.5 percent of the state’s Covid deaths were among the unvaccinated. The vaccine, however, has been readily available to anyone, although less than half the state’s 29 million residents have taken the jab.
Why? Does it have anything to do with the conspiracy theory nonsense spread by the Texas Taliban that Bill Gates has inserted a microchip into every shot and will track vaccinated Americans, or does it have to do with the nonsensical claim that the messenger RNA alters a person’s DNA? I have experienced, educated, and well-traveled friends who refuse the vaccine. I asked one of them at a social function why he was resisting, and he implied the pandemic was a kind of plot by hidden power brokers.
“There’s something going on in this country right now that’s very frightening,” he said. “But’s it’s not this virus.”
How do we reach these people when the state’s top elected leader is telling them they don’t need to wear masks in public places and conservative religious leaders are making statements that vaccines are not necessary when you are “washed in the blood of Jesus?” Magical thinking has never cured a single disease or solved a societal problem. Chances are good that every one of the people dying from the virus is doing so after having received polio vaccines as a child, and probably measles, mumps, rubella, and chickenpox vaccines. Suddenly, they don’t feel a need to be protected against a deadly virus because they have “liberty.”
There are beginning to be business consequences for Abbott and his Texas Taliban, though. Major tech employers in the state like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, are requiring employees returning to the workplace to wear masks. The Delta variant of the virus has prompted Dell Computers to delay reopening its offices to employees. Those same tech businesses are worried about the children of their workers as schools reopen. Just as the variant began to proliferate, Abbott’s Texas Education Agency issued guidance that told public school administrators they did not have to conduct contact tracing when a child was diagnosed in the classroom with Covid. The agency does not even require that parents be notified when their child is exposed to a classmate with the disease; it says only schools “should” inform the parent. The rational for this relaxed approach is the epidemiology that indicates there were low transmission rates of the virus among students last year because of their age. What goes unacknowledged in this thinking, however, is that there was no Delta variant inside the walls of public schools in 2020, and it is considerably more transmissible.
Children will be exposed and made sick, some will even die, and it will be Greg Abbott’s fault.
Vaccines are voluntary, he insists, and masks are not required. By mid-August, there were 2.3 million confirmed cases of Covid in the 254 counties of Texas, which is almost exactly an astonishing ten percent of the state’s population. The hospitals and emergency wards of the major cities are down to a handful of ICU beds and patients are sometimes waiting for treatment in the back of ambulances, which pulls down response times for critical care. In Dallas County, there are no longer any pediatric care ICU beds. County Judge Clay Jenkins said, "That means if your child's in a car wreck, if your child has a congenital heart defect or something and needs an ICU bed, or more likely if they have Covid and need an ICU bed, we don't have one. Your child will wait for another child to die.”
By the end of the week, the Austin metro area of 2.3 million people was down to a half dozen ICU beds, and the situation was equally extreme in Houston, El Paso, and San Antonio, Meanwhile, weary health care workers were walking off their jobs, fearing for their own lives and frustrated by policies that do nothing to stop the spread of the virus.
As leader of the Texas Taliban, Greg Abbott realized he had to at least appear like he was doing something to deal with the virus. Although he will not even suggest that Texans wear masks, he says the state is dispatching 2500 health care workers to make certain that hospitals are fully staffed as the variant runs wild. The Texas Tribune reports that 53 of this state’s hospitals have maxed out their ICU capacity, and in Houston, tents are being deployed for overflow patients. Texas, though, is supposedly willing to pay for the employees through the end of September, but no one has indicated where the state will find these health care providers. Who wants to come to what amounts to a “hot zone” of Covid, if they are employed helping people in a state where the government is taking rational steps to curtail the spread of the disease?
Abbott might have had more money to pay nurses he hadn’t wasted it on his dream of a Great Wall of Texas. In his latest irrational expenditure, Mr. Misguided is taking $25 million from the Texas Department of Transportation’s road repair budget to build two miles of wall near Eagle Pass on the Rio Grande. He has claimed publicly that his wall could extend hundreds of miles and cost about $250 million, which is patently bad math. If the two-mile stretch is extrapolated, you end up with about 10 miles of wall for $250 million. There are about 1000 miles of border in Texas, and your tax dollars will be wasted in a vain political attempt to build a wall that will stop nothing but migrating wildlife.
The comparison of Abbott’s Texas to Afghanistan is less of a reach than you might think. A very right wing, small conservative element of the state’s Republican Party is guiding his every move to ignore important issues and use social dynamics to implement oppressive laws and regulations. Texas women may not have to wear burqas yet, but their bodies are no longer their own under the abortion bill that becomes law on September 1. Immigrants, de-humanized as nothing more than Covid carriers, are also marginalized and arrested by a state that has no authority to enforce federal regulations on immigration. Abbott has used them as scapegoats to shoulder some of the blame for the spread of the virus but the state’s border counties belie his arguments because they lead Texas in vaccination rates and reduced infection numbers.
Local landowners have been convinced, or volunteered, to let the state build fences on their land to obstruct immigration. The legal concept is that Texas law officers can then arrest illegal border crossers for trespassing on private property. On publicly held land, the arrest would be without the force of law. The governor brags about “No more catch and release” but the immigrants arrested by local law enforcement and the Texas DPS can only be held 15 days. After their hearings, conducted over Zoom, they are either picked up by ICE or released from the Briscoe Prison where they were being held pending arraignments. ICE might further detain the suspects, but the agency is just as likely to assign them a court date and let them go as it is to deport them back to Mexico. In short, it is another sideshow that accomplishes nothing but spending more tax dollars that might be put to better use fighting Covid. The governor is not doing what is right; he’s doing what he thinks the small cartel of radical Republicans wants him to do.
The control of the Texas Taliban is only likely to tighten with the passage of voting rights restrictions by the state legislature. The Texas Senate has passed a bill unironically described as improving “voter or election integrity” in a state that has had only 16 cases of bad ballots. The state’s indicted attorney general, Ken Paxton, described his investigation as uncovering fraud but they were more a case of people using inaccurate or not up to date addresses. No one was trying to game the system. To find those incidents, his office launched staffers on 22,000 hours of wasted taxpayer time to justify future claims of voter fraud, which in turn are used as excuses for restricted voting rights. Even though he failed miserably to prove fraud, Trumpublicans and Abbott are doing as the Texas Taliban desire and passing laws that will make it harder for people to vote.
Democrats,though, left the state for Washington, D.C. to avoid giving the House a quorum to pass the new election regulations, and the speaker of the House issued civil warrants for the 52 missing lawmakers. Even as the governor called a subsequent special session to deal with the issue, the Democrats remained AWOL while the Senate again passed the legislation. The bill outlaws measures that make it easy for working class and minority voters to cast their ballots, which includes drive-through facilities and 24-hour voting. The constraints included will dramatically impact the state’s largest counties where one third of all Black, Asian, and Hispanic voters reside. Also, election officials will no longer be able to send out unrequested applications for a mail-in ballot, even to voters aged 65 and over who are automatically qualified to vote by mail. At least one version of the integrity bill that went through committee provided felony criminal penalties for any election worker who sent such applications.
The reactions from the business community have been largely against the new voting laws promulgated by Abbott and his Texas Taliban. Dell Technologies, AT&T, and American Airlines, for example, have expressed concern about free and fair elections and not harming the turnout of communities of color. Abbott, of course, trying to run the state by fiat, told business leaders that “they need to stay out of politics, especially when they have no idea what they are talking about.” Of course, if businesses stayed out of politics, Abbott would not have his $55 million dollar campaign fund, which got recent infusions of millions from energy companies that made billions when the state’s electrical grid failed.
On almost every front, the administration of Greg Abbott appears to be in conflict with his own state. He is suing school districts, counties, and various municipalities that want to protect citizens from the spread of Covid by issuing mask mandates. While he argues that individual liberty is important for people making decisions on vaccines and masks, he takes that liberty away from local governments and business owners. Meanwhile, schools are about to spread the virus to children, hospitals are overrun, the electrical grid might fail again, and the governor is wasting money on a meaningless wall, and a small percentage of radical Republicans are driving every decision made by Greg Abbott.
Texghanistan increasingly looks on the verge of collapse.
Truth for Texas
My Super PAC is raising money to support the effort to defeat the conservative Republican effort to make it more difficult to vote in Texas. We are close to enough money to launch our first online ad campaign to turn up the heat on those who use words like “voter integrity” but really mean “fewer voters of color.” If you are interested, please visit Truth for Texas.