Abbott and other Texas Republicans have taken actions that will help them stay in power, but they done nothing to help the plight of ordinary citizens. They have no interest in actually governing.
The following is part of an editorial in The New York Times by Mimi Swartz (executive editor of The Texas Monthly):
Republicans hold the power here in Texas, and as in so much of the nation, holding onto it is their top priority.
“Governing” is a term with which they do not seem familiar. Or, at least, governing in the conventional sense, which used to mean assenting to the will of the majority while also looking out for the most vulnerable citizens. Like schoolchildren. I don’t know what to call what our leaders are doing now, but it isn’t that. For the millions of us in the state who are not hard-right Republicans or supporters of the governor, the question we should ask ourselves is, why not?
What they have been doing is making Texas appealing for corporations and for hard-right culture warriors. Mr. Abbott, the performative governor, really likes a publicity stunt: busing migrants to Washington, D.C., in an ultimately pointless (though, for many migrants, unintentionally welcome) effort to “take the border to President Biden,” as the governor put it; or sending the Texas National Guard to the border as part of another pointless — but very expensive — action, ostensibly to secure the southern border but more likely to hold off challenges from Mr. Abbott’s right.
Yes, this is a state where the freedom of individuals to do whatever boneheaded thing they want to do has always been sacrosanct. Yes, this is a state where “responsible gun owner” is not an oxymoron — children as young as 8 grow up learning to shoot and hunt here. And yes, depending on which polls you look at, Mr. Abbott is running comfortably ahead of Mr. O’Rourke, or at least ahead of him.
Still, none of these facts suggest — or endorse — the mandate with which those at the top of the Texas ticket have been operating. An early May poll from The Texas Politics Project found Texans gloomier than usual: 43 percent said that their family’s economic situation was worse compared with last year, the highest figure since 2009. The poll began in 2008, and this one marked just the second time that the percentage of respondents who said that the state was on the wrong track exceeded 50 percent.
It doesn’t sound like a majority of Texans have enjoyed Republicans’ handling of abortion. Already, we have one of the most restrictive laws in the country — and if Roe falls, we will have a trigger ban that eliminates access completely. When asked if they supported or opposed banning all abortions in the state if the Supreme Court overturns Roe, 54 percent of voters said they were opposed, with 42 percent strongly opposed. As for the constitutional carry law that passed last year — the one that means anyone 21 or older can carry a handgun without a license — a majority of Texans, along with many law enforcement officials, opposed it.
For a stretch last year, more Texans disapproved of Mr. Abbott than approved of him — a rarity since 2015. His rating bounced back this spring, to 47 percent approval vs. 41 percent disapproval. Republicans still like him — as of April, 80 percent approved.
And yet: If the measure of a leader is how he operates in a crisis, Mr. Abbott has failed at every turn — sometimes spectacularly, if such a thing can be said. Some examples: The freeze in February 2021 that officially killed 246 Texans, though the real toll was likely far higher, while donors from energy companies made off like bandits. His antipathy toward vaccination mandates of almost any kind while more than 88,000 Texans died of Covid. His failure to even consider that his stance against abortion in the case of rape would cause what some think of as forced births. No worries: Mr. Abbott said that his administration would “eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas.”
Who, then, could be surprised when he said about the school shooting in Uvalde that “as horrible as what happened, it could have been worse”?
Such responses are not because of Mr. Abbott’s lack of empathy, as many have suggested. Well, he does seem to be lacking in empathy, but there are other, more salient factors at work. After the 2018 Santa Fe High School shooting, he did make a feeble attempt at new school safety regulations but soon retreated.
Ultimately, a big reason for this hard-right governing is and has been the base of Republican primary voters. In a state of almost 30 million, roughly 17 million are registered to vote, but only about two million voted in the past two Republican primaries — and those who do vote dependably are older, white and far to the right. In this year’s primary, a Republican candidate could have won the nomination with under 4 percent of voters. So the typical calculus for Republican politicians is this: Keep the far-right voter base happy, and you are a guaranteed winner in Republican-dominated Texas.
This is why Lieutenant Governor Patrick can get away with claiming that arming teachers is the way to prevent school shootings, and why Ted Cruz’s solution to preventing the deaths of schoolchildren is to keep all but one door to school buildings locked, fire marshalls be damned.
So when you see Mr. Abbott sitting stone faced on a dais when confronted by an angry Mr. O’Rourke or by an emotional State Senator Roland Gutierrez, who begged for a special session to address gun violence, it may be because the governor is shocked that anyone would have the bad manners to question, much less confront him.
But it’s also because he doesn’t have to answer to anyone on that side of the political spectrum. They don’t matter, just like the folks at Discovery Green didn’t matter.
