Consider our Gov. Greg Abbott: duly elected to represent the entire state of Texas, not just the suburban, white Republicans with whom he obviously feels most comfortable. Letting his hair down this week for the Bell County GOP, the governor rebranded the city he’s called home for decades the “People’s Republic of Austin” (can’t these duffers even come up with some new jokes?), and then he got personal. “As you leave Austin and start heading north, you start feeling different. Once you cross the Travis County line, it starts smelling different. And you know what that fragrance is? Freedom. It’s the smell of freedom that does not exist in Austin, Texas.”
Abbott is nervous that his hard-right thunder has been stolen by Lt. Gov. Dan “Shameless Panderer” Patrick, and along with Patrick nipping at his heels there’s the presidential gleam that sparks in every Texas governor’s eye. Since Donald Trump has confirmed that there is literally no political poison that GOP voters won’t swallow, it must be difficult for Abbott to find some ideological ground to stand on. Shortly after “joking” that reporters should be wary of his proficiency with guns, he decided Austin and Travis County present even handier targets – like those Republicans who hate D.C. so much they can’t wait to join the federal lobby line.
There was also his reflexive crack that Austin wants to “California-ize” Texas (as if waves of Western immigrants hadn’t already spiked our housing prices) – that was while signing a bill to let California-based Uber impose its own corporate priorities on local residents. We could call this hypocrisy, but it’s so transparent it hardly merits the epithet.
Shameful Litany
All this was preamble to Abbott’s rollout of his special legislative session agenda, an excuse to spend another month (and plenty of public money) campaigning to front-load next year’s Republican primaries. The 20 items on the governor’s to-do list range from the innocuous – virtually administrative approval of agencies that would otherwise sunset – to headline-grabbing, like the absurd GOP obsession with bathroom purification (reduced in Abbott’s agenda litany to a single word: “privacy”).
Patrick and the Senate sabotaged the sunset legislation in order to force the special session, but as the Texas Tribune’s Ross Ramsey notes, “If you rank the potential special-session subjects in order of their likely success, Patrick’s top issue – the bathroom bill – sits solidly in last place … [and] anybody hoping to pass other bills will be hacking through a thicket.”
That’s not to say there isn’t plenty here to cause alarm to rational Texans, and to confirm the reaction of Mayor Steve Adler that Abbott’s shotgun agenda amounts to a “war on cities.” Beginning with a cosmetic public school “teacher pay increase” (supposedly to be accomplished without new funding), there will be another run at making it easier to fire those same teachers. “School choice” (i.e., private school vouchers, opposed even by rural Republicans) is in the mix, as are “property tax reform” and “caps on spending” (more attempts to punish local jurisdictions for the state’s refusal to fund public schools).
If that were not enough, a half-dozen items on the list would make it harder for cities and counties to protect the environment (and even trees), to annex suburban free-riders, even to regulate traffic hazards that burden local police. (Signing a bill that will finally ban texting-while-driving statewide, Abbott said the Lege should now prohibit any other local regulation of vehicular phone use – thus likely making it impossible to enforce the texting ban.)
Inevitably, there are a handful of items to further restrict health care access and reproductive rights for women – always in the name of defending “life.” The GOP fetus-fetish would be laughable if didn’t directly impact so many vulnerable women and their families.
Killing Mothers
Abbott apparently retains some ability to be embarrassed; the final item of his agenda would extend the existence of the Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Task Force, an effort to determine why the Texas rate of maternal mortality has become the highest in the developed world. The spike in maternal deaths actually predates the most recent legislative assaults on reproductive rights that closed Planned Parenthood clinics across the state, severely limiting access to basic health care, especially in rural areas.
As Katha Pollitt reported in The Nation, we don’t know all the causes of the fatalities but, “We do know that most of them died because they were low-income women who lacked good medical care. A lot of them were on Medicaid – and in Texas, that means extreme poverty: Texas is one of 19 states that have refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.”
During Abbott’s cynical special session, don’t expect to hear much about this 20th-ranked priority in the governor’s wish list. It will feature much more waving of the bloody shirt over “privacy” and property taxes. What’s that smell coming from the governor’s mansion? It’s pure-dee Texas horseshit.
This article appears in June 9 • 2017.
