While the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court sided sufficiently with Abbott in resolving such matters whenever differences sprouted as legal challenges, some on the far right nonetheless began referring to him as "King Abbott" for his gubernatorial declarations during the unfolding crisis. The two-term governor has seen his name and actions linked to tyranny.
Which brings us to what's likely behind the governor’s disappointing, all-too-familiar, rabble-rousing God-and-guns State of the State address, brimming with ambiguities and undisguised partisan pandering: For the first time, Texas' most popular Republican is staring at possibly formidable re-election challenges on both his right and left. At the moment, he’s clearly more worried about his right flank.
Leading in criticism of the governor as well as in actually filing lawsuits against him is former Army Lt. Col. Allen West, the carpet-bagging, secession-raising, one-term Florida congressman now only months into his new post chairing the Republican Party of Texas. Some of you may well remember Col. West. Last spring he led a rally in Austin protesting, among other pandemic public safety measures, the wearing of facial coverings or masks. Hours later he got banged up in an accident on his motorcycle on Interstate 35 in McLennan County and wound up in Baylor Scott & White Medical Center in Waco where a bunch of doctors and nurses wearing facial coverings for his personal safety stitched him back together.
Given that Col. West's attacks have been directed at Abbott as much as Democrats — including a failed lawsuit protesting Abbott's expansion of early voting by six measly days (on the grounds that only the Legislature can pursue such actions, even in a deadly pandemic) — some political observers have concluded West is laying the foundation for a primary election challenge to Abbott’s seeking a third term. Part of the strategy seems to be making Abbott look like President Obama, governing by executive decree (notwithstanding the fact this was also President Trump's style of governance as well). Only last week Col. West endorsed state legislation by Republican state Rep. Kyle Biedermann allowing state residents to vote on whether to secede from the United States. Supporters label this unconstitutional effort "Texit" after a very dissimilar effort by the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Union.
If that’s not enough to keep Abbott awake nights, Texas’ most popular Democrat, former congressman Beto O'Rourke of El Paso, has voiced notions of running for governor in 2022. During a radio interview last month, O’Rourke suggested no other state has suffered from failures to address the pandemic to the degree Texas has, and that Abbott is ultimately responsible. "I want to make sure we have someone in the highest office in our state who’s going to make sure that all of us are OK,” the charismatic West Texan said. “And especially those communities that so often don’t get the resources or attention or the help, like El Paso.”
All of this helps explain Abbott’s State of the State address listing his priorities for the Texas Legislature, itself still trying to figure out the business of governing in a pandemic. (If you watched recent redistricting hearings, you know the problems both legislators and the public have with ZOOM technology.) The governor’s address threw plenty of red meat to ravenous Texas Republicans, obviously to discourage any primary election challenge from the far right: passing a state law penalizing cities that “defund” police departments (yet minus any mention of the reforms Abbott promised a grieving family in the wake of former Texan George Floyd’s shocking May 25, 2020, death by cop); creating a “sanctuary state” for gun rights (whatever that means); blocking governmental entities from shutting down churches or other religious activities; and taking steps to ensure “election integrity.” For the uninformed, “election integrity” in Republicanese translates to “voter suppression,” the go-to recourse when party activists and politicians refuse to change policy stances to accommodate the broader public and would rather just make it harder for some of us to vote. Such laws might help Abbott if O’Rourke runs for governor, given the latter’s stunning grassroots support during his strong 2018 run against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. Abbott’s tip of the hat to gun rights is no doubt a reminder that, in the wake of a massacre specifically targeting Hispanics in El Paso in summer 2019, O’Rourke angrily suggested outlawing private ownership of assault weapons.
Given the streak of anti-democratic ideology increasingly infecting the Republican Party of Texas, voters who subscribe to the notion of a democratic republic should worry about bills that would make it more difficult for everyday voters to cast ballots in Texas or penalize for simple mistakes rank-and-file election workers who must navigate complicated state election laws (plus endure some pretty indignant voters and poll watchers on occasion). Voting is supposed to be a right, not a privilege, and when the state of Texas makes a constitutional right harder to pursue (and in the absence of any significant evidence of election fraud), it’s clear such measures aim at one thing: preserving and defending not the U.S. Constitution but anxious Republican lawmakers and governors whose views are more and more rancid and out of touch with constituents. Those who hold to the rallying cry of widespread election fraud in President Trump’s 2020 defeat need to actually read the dozens of court opinions in which jurists Democratic and Republican — some even Trump appointees — found such claims sorely wanting to the point of obvious fabrication. Yet Republican state Rep. Briscoe Cain, who less than three months ago helped the Trump campaign press a desperate lawsuit to throw out millions of Pennsylvanians’ votes, has now been elevated to chair the Texas House Elections Committee. For the record, the federal judge who dismissed the lawsuit as “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations” is no boot-licking, Democratic toad; he’s a former Pennsylvania Republican Party official and a member of the rigorously conservative Federalist Society. To quote U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann in his ruling regarding this frivolous, Cain-assisted lawsuit: “In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state. Our people, laws and institutions demand more.”
As for the pandemic, Abbott remains in a tough spot. The Trump administration that Abbott dutifully supported deceived both the public and incoming Biden administration regarding vaccine reserves. Result: For all the governor’s organizational abilities during this crisis, the pandemic-pummeled state of Texas is now faced with trying to reach herd immunity of at least 70 percent when there’s a shortage of vaccine available nationwide. And till we reach herd immunity and more of us feel safe going into businesses and eating in restaurants, trying to energize the economic sector will remain a steep challenge. To make matters worse, more transmissible and possibly deadly variants of SARS-CoV-2 are on the loose, likely to exacerbate death tolls and hospitalizations that only now are beginning to decline. (And to hear local public health officials last week, the likely reason for this decline is that we've now passed the period of lingering consequences from large swaths of the public traveling and gathering for the holidays.)
With Lt. Col. West nipping at his political heels and threatening any dream Abbott might have of higher office; with Democratic President Joe Biden now scoring higher approval ratings in Texas than even Abbott (by two whole points in a University of Houston Hobby School of Public Affairs poll); with Abbott’s reluctance to pursue the wild-eyed, science-denying course of Republican governors in South Dakota and Florida while shamelessly pandering in other ways to unbalanced gun enthusiasts and Old Testament thumpers, the governor of Texas is increasingly showing signs of wanting to have his cake and eat it too. Abbott's setting the course for the Texas Legislature — complete with the claim that “the government is coming to get your guns” — shows he has decided against leading a badly divided, fast-decaying Republican Party out of the swamp of QAnon conspiracy theories and stolen elections and secessionist tendencies. Sadly, this means during the 87th legislative session fixes to problems that don’t exist and indifference to problems that do.
