Gov. Greg Abbott appeared this week to rebuff help from the federal government to give coronavirus testing to migrants before they are released from federal custody, saying it’s a federal responsibility to screen immigrants coming into Texas.
The announcement came after Abbott, a Republican, repeatedly accused the administration of Democratic President Joe Biden of “releasing immigrants in South Texas that have been exposing Texans to COVID.” The Biden administration denied that Thursday, and CNN reported that Abbott was “stalling” on a federal offer to pitch in on testing migrants.
Abbott and Biden have been fighting for days over coronavirus safety protocols and whose actions have been putting the health of Texans at risk. After Abbott announced this week that he was lifting Texas’ statewide mask mandate and capacity restrictions on businesses, Biden called that decision “Neanderthal thinking.” Abbott shot back in multiple interviews and social media posts that Biden’s immigration policies were the real threat to Texans and accused the president of releasing migrants with COVID-19 into Texas.
“The Biden Administration is recklessly releasing hundreds of illegal immigrants who have COVID into Texas communities,” Abbott wrote in one tweet Wednesday afternoon.
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It’s bad enough that they’re rapists and criminals, but rapists and criminals with COVID!! That’s just a bridge too far!! (But they won’t have to wear masks when they get here, okay?)
Wait… so COVID is the Mexico virus, not the China virus? <confused>
It’s the same old bullshit where they glom onto one of the old saws about illegal immigrants and attribute whatever’s currently scaring people to them, and accuse the Democrats of being soft on immigrants and wanting to put immigrant rights ahead of whatever’s scaring people. Used to be criminal immigrants, now it’s COVID immigrants.
And too many voters in the state are low-information and/or just flat out stupid, so they eat that up.
The scale of the misdirection is particularly breathtaking here. Abbott is encouraging a public panic over the notion of OMG hundreds!!! of migrants with COVID exposing Texas to the virus.
Meanwhile, Texas already has hundreds of thousands of Texans with COVID spreading the virus in the state. And that is such a minor issue to Abbott that he has no problem with throwing out mask mandates and social distancing requirements.
It couldn’t possibly be clearer that absolutely the only reason he’s expressing concerns about COVID is simply for an opportunity to bash migrants and the feds.
The annoying part is that illegal immigration is a thorny enough issue in its own right, without complicating it with phantom issues like COVID or criminals. I mean, it’s far from a clear-cut issue (unless you’re extremely far right OR far left), but adding unprovable nonsense for fear-mongering just makes actually addressing it nearly impossible.
Sometimes I think the GOP doesn’t actually want to get rid of illegal immigration/come up with a plan to address it, because it would take away one of their largest boogeymen.
Yeah, their specialty is being against stuff. Especially being against whatever the Democratic President is for. It means they never have to come up with… well, anything. Case in point-- the ACA. They’ve been against it from Day One because reasons. But they and their (so-called) president had four years to come up with something better, and they didn’t even try.
Frankly, I believe it suits them just fine to have Biden as President. They can take up their familiar oppositional stance and keep building their base without actually having to DO anything or solve any problems. So much easier than being in charge. Just dismiss, veto, and oppose anything he comes up with. Lazy win-win.
Coincidentally, this WaPo opinion piece today by conservative Megan McArdle expresses these very thoughts:
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Complain all you want that the covid-19 relief bill has been packed with all sorts of unrelated stuff from the Democratic wish list — at least the Democrats have a wish list. What’s the Republican equivalent? Often it seems to be literally a bunch of wishes — that the media wouldn’t be so liberal or so mean, that corporations wouldn’t go Full Woke in their diversity trainings, that social media platforms would stop wielding the ban-hammer so enthusiastically against conservatives.
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There’s a lot of important stuff going on in the world, and I’m worried we’re missing it by becoming literally reactionary — not so much for anything as against whatever the left is doing. A once-proud movement risks turning into one perpetual, primal scream: “I’m not gonna, and you can’t make me.”
That is not a movement; it is a second adolescence. And whatever the merits of masks or reopening, that reflexively oppositional impulse is unhealthy — for conservatives, and for America.
I really wish they’d make this a science experiment. Those in attendance get a Covid test (but not get it revealed) before going. Log all the participants then follow up with disease tracking. That way you could develop a “Coefficient of Stupid” for future use.
Note: I’m am not a statistician, medical professional or test designer. But I do like popcorn.
I think in theory, conservatism used to be typified by the adage “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it”, and performed a valuable function by putting a necessary brake on change for change’s sake, and requiring a higher level of justification for spending the people’s money.
But it wasn’t reactionary; they had their own ideas about how things should run, and how to get there. The author’s right- the whole Republican party seems to be centered around resisting the Democratic party in every way, shape, and form, not about offering a competing vision of the future. Which twists them up in all sorts of frankly stupid knots- who in their right mind argues against clean air, for example? We adjusted to the Clean Air Act nearly 60 years ago without it having any significant negative economic effects. And worse, they reflexively oppose proposals that their own politicians have proposed, because the Democrats have taken them up. Cap and trade, Romney/Obamacare, etc… are examples.
Personally, I think the GOP is going to have to implode, or someone’s going to have to play Brutus at some point, before things get better, because too many voters support this nonsense for it to die a slow death.
It seems to have a second dimension which is a very nebulous idea that things were better “in the past” with a desire to revert back to those better times. Which is kind of absurd as a fundamental underpinning of a political party’s platform.
I’d argue that the Republican party doesn’t exist anymore. There is the Democratic party, and the Anti-Democratic party. People asking when the Republican party will die or cease to exist missed that it already happened. My personal guess is that it was severely wounded when Bush Sr. was in office, suffered greatly under 8 years of Clinton, was a shell of itself during the Bush Jr. years, and died off when Obama was in office (the Tea Party may have provided the death blow). Romney was the last actual Republican nominee. Trump was nominated by the newly-formed Anti-Democratic party, and that’s what we have now.
As long as Democrats continue expressing concern about the self-harm in the actions of GOP voters, they will never stop. As noted by Atamasama, the GOP has essentially ceased to exist as a governing body and has conditioned its base to oppose everyone to the left of them solely for the sake of that opposition. Anything that makes a librul upset is, therefore, ipso facto, a good thing to do. If Biden and Harris were to appear on television and express a forceful opinion that parents should not murder their children with chainsaws, the market for watertight coffins would spike overnight in red-state America.
They’ve effectively become a highly successful anti-majority party in the sense that it understands how to use the political and legal machinery within the Constitution to obstruct the progressive and moderate left agenda. They’ve also been effective at information warfare as well.
The Republican party isn’t really good at governing anymore, as evidenced by how little they achieved in terms of bicameral legislation during the time when they had total power in the federal government. They railed like hell against Obamacare, and had a president willing to sign its death warrant; they couldn’t get it done.
Nevertheless, what power they do have, they know how to use to the fullest. Mitch McConnell used the filibuster when the GOP was in the minority to blunt Obama’s political mandate, which ended up in a very consequential political defeat in 2010 - a year that just happened to be the year when congressional apportionment is set. And even in defeat in 2018 and 2020, the Republicans managed to retain that power 10 years later. And they still understand the power that comes from winning state and local elections, and they will use that power to rig the vote in the next few election cycles.
It’s really up to the voters themselves to see what Republicans are doing, and not fall for the lies and spin that keep getting these critters elected at any level.
It’s time to revive the Greg-specific thread. Prepare for more outrages.
A Texas prison has officially started detaining immigrants accused of state crimes after allegedly crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally as part of Gov. Greg Abbott’s heightened border security efforts.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice said Wednesday that Val Verde County, home to Del Rio, sent three people arrested under Abbott’s border initiative Tuesday to the Briscoe Unit in Dilley, a small town between San Antonio and Laredo. The number of detainees is expected to grow rapidly; the Val Verde county attorney predicted about 50 arrests of immigrants a day, ramping up to as many as 200 daily by August.
The Val Verde County sheriff’s office said the Briscoe detainees had been arrested on accusations of criminal trespassing. County officials previously said state police would begin arresting immigrants crossing the border, largely on trespassing and criminal mischief charges — both misdemeanors that could result in up to a year in jail. It’s a novel approach ordered by Abbott to allow state and local law enforcement officers to arrest immigrants for state crimes, since they have no jurisdictional power to arrest someone accused of the federal crime of crossing the border illegally.
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“Novel.” Right. Greg is known for that.
Like refusing to pay the staff members of the Dems who are in Washington depriving him of the quorum that he needs to clamp down on fair voting in the state. That’s novel, too.
Stephen F. Austin, Donnie Darko and a person who calls himself the King of the Wild Frontier were among the first people to give money to support Gov. Greg Abbott’s border wall effort after he announced he would be seeking private donations to help fund it.
But there’s no way to verify if Austin, who donated $10, is of any relation to the man known as the “Father of Texas,” or if Darko, who gave $25, bears resemblance to the titular character in the cult film about a teenage boy who meets a man in a bunny suit who tells him the world will end in 28 days. The King of the Wild Frontier donated $50, but public records don’t state where he lives.
Despite promises from Abbott that transparency in the crowdfunding process for the border wall would be paramount, donor information released to The Texas Tribune for the first week of collections was bereft of any way to verify the identities of the majority of the donors. Abbott’s office is not disclosing the locations of donors, nor is it requiring that they identify themselves with their real names.
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Greg (like Republicans in general) is channeling Humpty Dumpty:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean —neither more nor less.”
This applies especially to words like “transparency and accountability.”