Tag Archives: Abbott

Texas Again

Texas really should serve as the primo example of a thoroughly UnAmerican state, a first-place spot that has been occupied until now by Florida. Granted, Florida won’t give up its win without a fight, and DeSantis’ success in turning Florida into a quasi-fascist state is impressive in a horrifying sort of way. But Texas is a worthy competitor.

We’ve all seen the death and destruction that accompanied the recent floods, and while Trump’s inept administration contributed significantly to the tragedy, the refusal to provide adequate warning mechanisms was a state and local decision. That bit of bad governance shouldn’t have come as a surprise; the administration of Governor Abbott–an administration that includes the state’s slimy Attorney General Ken Paxton and a GOP-dominated legislature–has diligently followed the MAGA (and Florida) playbook.

A few examples:

As enthusiastic participants in MAGA’s war on education, Texas has passed laws restricting expressive conduct on public campuses—banning protests and reassigning governance authority from faculty to politically appointed boards.

In its zealous war on immigration, Operation Lone Star has used razor wire and troop deployments, and engaged in mass busing of migrants to so-called “sanctuary cities.” The state also created state-level crimes for illegal entry and empower state judges to deport migrants–measures even the very conservative Fifth Circuit ruled unconstitutional.

Texas has enthusiastically fought the culture war: banning abortion, banning gender-affirming treatment for minors, and threatening medical professionals with license revocation.

Texas Republicans have eliminated Diversity, Equity & Inclusion efforts wherever possible, and removed such offices from public universities.

The state passed a law restricting content moderation on social media (an effort that has been temporarily blocked).

Because cities have a tendency to vote Blue, Texas passed what has been dubbed a “Death Star” law, restricting the powers of municipal governments to pass progressive policies. (A Travis County judge struck it down as unconstitutional interference in local self-governance.)

The Texas GOP’s Christian Nationalists won passage of a senate bill 10 requiring display of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms.

Given the fact that many of these efforts have been stymied by courts noting their inconsistency with that pesky constitution, Abbott is emulating Trump; The Houston Chronicle recently accused Abbott of judicial appointments intended to reshape the Texas Supreme Court in his image.

It isn’t just the Texas Supreme Court. The Lever recently published an expose of a new kind of “court packing” in the great state of Texas.

On Sept. 1, Texas is slated to open its new business courts, a brand-new legal system backed by Big Oil — and several of the court’s main judges have in the past represented fossil fuel companies as lawyers, The Lever has found.

The judges were hand-picked over the last two months by Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, a major recipient of oil industry cash — and many can be quickly replaced if they hand down decisions he opposes, a judicial design that he championed.

The courts consist of 11 regional business courts and a new statewide court of appeals to hear appellate litigation, which are expected to have immediate impacts on environmental cases in the state. As Public Health Watch, an independent investigative news organization, reported last month, a suite of cases involving state environmental authorities will now be transferred from a generally liberal appeals court to the state’s new Fifteenth Court of Appeals, created to oversee the business courts.

There, these cases will be decided by a panel of conservative judges historically friendly to industry — particularly oil and gas interests, a powerful force in Texas.

As a leader of the state’s Public Citizen organization put it, Abbot has created a “boutique court for corporations where he, not the voters, gets to pick the judges.” The article goes into some detail about the judges who have been appointed–details unlikely to comfort litigants who might be hoping for dispassionate judicial conduct.

For the past several years, pundits have predicted a revolt by Texas voters sufficient to turn the state purple, if not Blue. Extreme gerrymandering has forestalled that revolt, if indeed it was imminent, and as I posted a few days ago, Abbott has now called for a mid-cycle redistricting–a move urged by Trump as a means to maintain GOP control of the House of Representatives.

Political experts are dubious about the tactic. As Politico has explained,

The thoroughness of Texas’ gerrymander during the last round of redistricting in 2021 leaves no room for Republicans to grow their 25-member majority among the state’s 38 seats in the House of Representatives. Any alteration of the map will only hurt the GOP’s sitting incumbents and comes with a risk of backfiring.

We can only hope.

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Oh Texas….

I know that Florida, under Ron DeSantis, deserves all the shade being thrown at it. But Florida–and that ubiquitous “Florida man”– is facing a strong challenge from Texas.

Most recently, of course, we’ve been treated to the spectacle of Ken Paxton’s willingness to cause the death of a pregnant woman–a mother of two–who obtained a court ruling permitting her to abort her current pregnancy. That decision was based on testimony that her fetus had been found to have a condition that would prevent its survival, and that continuation of the pregnancy would endanger the woman’s life–or at the very least, her ability to have future, healthy pregnancies.

As I noted a couple of days ago, Paxton appealed that court decision and the Texas Supreme court overruled it.

A federal court  has ordered Texas Governor Abbott to remove the lethal barriers he had placed in the Rio Grande, after a lengthy battle during which Abbott defended placement of the impediments, which had caused the deaths of at least two people.

In case there is any confusion, these examples confirm the accuracy of accusations that these Texan staunchly “pro life” Republicans have very selective definitions of “life.”

And then there’s the refusal of the Texas GOP to distance the party from Nazism.

The leadership body for the Republican Party of Texas this week voted down a measure to block members from associating with people and organizations “known to espouse or tolerate antisemitism, pro-Nazi sympathies or Holocaust denial.” This came just weeks after neo-Nazi extremist Nick Fuentes was photographed meeting with a high-profile conservative political operative whose “Defend Texas Liberty” PAC has helped elect Republicans statewide.

The clause, part of a broader resolution in support of Israel, was voted down 32-29 by the Texas GOP’s Executive Committee on Saturday, according to The Texas Tribune. Moreover, “roughly half of the board also tried to prevent a record of their vote from being kept,” in a move that “stunned some members,” the paper reported. Speaking during Saturday’s vote, Texas GOP chair Matt Rinaldi claimed that he didn’t see “any antisemitic, pro-Nazi or Holocaust denial movement on the right that has any significant traction whatsoever.” Rinaldi was also reportedly present in the offices for conservative consulting firm White Horse Strategies, owned by Defend Texas Liberty leader Jonathan Stickland, at the same time as Fuentes last October. He has claimed he was not part of Fuentes’ meeting there, and was unaware of Fuentes’ presence.

If the Texas GOP chair can’t see any “traction” of anti-semitism from the right, I wonder what he can see. From the “very fine people” who chanted “Jews shall not replace us” in Charlottesville to the mounting number of attacks on synagogues and individual Jews, most Americans of good will can see quite a lot of “traction.”

Texas’ current government is dominated by MAGA Republicans determined to keep power by limiting the right of Democratic -leaning constituencies to vote. Scholars at the Brennan Center have described the background of that organization’s current challenge to a measure passed by the Republican-dominated legislature. They allege that Texas has enacted

onerous new rules for voting by mail and curbs voter outreach activities. It also hinders voting assistance for people with language barriers or disabilities and restricts election officials’ and judges’ ability to protect voters from harassment by poll watchers. Like the dozens of restrictive state voting laws that have been enacted nationwide in the last three years, S.B. 1’s proponents claim that it is intended to fight voter fraud. Indeed, its myriad provisions appear to respond directly to baseless claims peddled by Donald Trump and his fellow election deniers about the security of mail-in voting and election administration.

Yet Texas has never found evidence of widespread fraud — and not for lack of trying. Without the pretext of making elections more secure, S.B. 1 is simply an unconstitutional effort to suppress eligible voters in marginalized communities. It seems no coincidence that after people of color surged in turnout in Texas’s 2018 and 2020 elections, the legislature passed a law that restricts methods of voting favored by Black and Latino voters and impairs voter assistance to those with limited English proficiency or limited literacy.

it isn’t only their appalling public behavior. Texas Republicans like Paxton are demonstrably personally corrupt, and that corruption was given a pass by the state’s GOP-dominated legislature. Paxton was acquitted on 16 articles of impeachment, a proceeding triggered by accusations from lawyers on his own staff and buttressed by significant evidence that he had abused the powers of his office to help an Austin real estate investor who was under federal investigation.

The Texas GOP is a cesspool–even more venal and vile than the GOP of DeSantis’ Florida.

I guess everything is bigger in Texas.

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The Rear-View Mirror

Like many who read this blog, I get the Letter from an American from Heather Cox Richardson. Richardson is a historian, and the great benefit of her Letters is that they provide what I like to think of as a look in humanity’s rear-view mirror.

Driving a car requires checking the traffic behind us in order to navigate the road ahead. History serves much the same purpose (which is one of the many, many reasons why the rightwing hysteria over teaching the country’s history of racism is so deranged…)

A few days ago, Richardson shared an “aha” moment.

It has been hard for me to see the historical outlines of the present-day attack on American democracy clearly. But this morning, as I was reading a piece in Vox by foreign affairs specialist Zack Beauchamp, describing Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s path in Florida as an attempt to follow in the footsteps of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, the penny dropped.

She proceeded to outline the political currents prior to the election of Trump: the evolution of today’s GOP into the pro-oligarchy party, following what she described as the usual U.S. historical pattern to that point– “in the 1850s, 1890s, 1920s, and then again in the modern era, wealthy people had come around to the idea that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran everything.”

Each of those periods was a reaction to the expansion of civil equality. Richardson reports that wealthier Americans protected their privileged status by playing on the racism of  poorer white male voters– telling them that passage of laws protecting equal rights was really a plan to turn American governance over to immigrants or to Black or Brown Americans.

The idea that poor men of color voting meant socialism resonated with white voters, who turned against the government’s protecting equal rights and instead supported a government that favored men of property. As wealth moved upward, popular culture championed economic leaders as true heroes, and lawmakers suppressed voting in order to “redeem” American society from “socialists” who wanted to redistribute wealth. Capital moved upward until a very few people controlled most of it, and then, usually after an economic crash made ordinary Americans turn against the system that favored the wealthy, the cycle began again.

When Trump was elected, the U.S. was at the place where wealth had concentrated among the top 1%, Republican politicians denigrated their opponents as un-American “takers” and celebrated economic leaders as “makers,” and the process of skewing the vote through gerrymandering and voter suppression was well underway. But the Republican Party still valued the rule of law. It’s impossible to run a successful business without a level playing field, as businessmen realized after the 1929 Great Crash, when it became clear that insider trading had meant that winners and losers were determined not by the market but by cronyism.

Trump deviated from the usual cycle in one way–he didn’t care about enriching the oligarchy, only about enriching himself, his toadies and his family. Despite his  repellent personality and embarrassing ignorance of government and policy, he was especially dangerous because he turned the Republican base into a cult that no longer respected the rule of law.

Richardson warns that Trump’s deliberate destabilization of faith in our democratic norms is especially dangerous because it creates space for two right-wing, antidemocratic ideologies. Two current Republican governors model those ideologies: Abbott in Texas, who is pursuing the South’s Civil War insistence on “states’ rights,” and DeSantis in Florida, who is emulating Viktor Orbán’s “soft fascism.”

Orbán has taken control of Hungary’s media, ensuring that his party wins all elections; has manipulated election districts in his own favor; and has consolidated the economy into the hands of his cronies by threatening opponents with harassing investigations, regulations, and taxes unless they sell out.

DeSantis is following this model right down to the fact that observers believe that Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill was modeled on a similar Hungarian law. DeSantis’s attack on Disney mirrors Orbán’s use of regulatory laws to punish political opponents (although the new law was so hasty and flawed it threatens to do DeSantis more harm than good).

Richardson counsels us to look in that rear-view mirror–to access the knowledge and tools that history provides to defend democracy from the ideology of states’ rights.” But she also warns that, because the rise of “illiberal democracy” or “soft fascism” is new to us, we need to understand how it differs both from Trump’s version of autocracy and from the old arguments for states’ rights.

At risk of over-extending my somewhat strained analogy, Orbanism represents a massive pothole on the road to democratic self-governance and civil liberty–a pothole requiring us to drive carefully and keep our eyes on the road– ahead and behind.

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