Crazy in Texas Part II
There’s nothing like a crisis to highlight the ill-prepared and the incompetent. Texas has always been a state that puts business interests over its citizens. I wrote about this in my post Crazy in Texas. Now we have our top leaders stumbling over each other in a race to the bottom.
I’ll start with our Attorney General Ken Paxton. He and his cronies have done everything they can to strip away healthcare from Texas residents. They didn’t expand Medicaid under the ACA. They led the charge to get rid of the personal mandate of the ACA then filed suit to get rid of the ACA because the act relied on the personal mandate. They’ve filed lawsuits to strip planned parenthood of funding. Now Mr. Paxton is using the coronavirus to help promote his anti-abortion stance.
“I find it extremely distressing … that we are trying to respond to a purely political fight that [Gov. Greg Abbott] started. Patients who need abortions are on a time-sensitive deadline,” Massingill said.
Providers have already had to turn away patients, Massingill added, and delays of even a few weeks could render some abortions impossible if the patients’ pregnancies extend past legal deadlines.
Whole Women’s Health operates two Texas abortion clinics, in Fort Worth and in Austin. Amy Hagstrom Miller, the group’s president and CEO, said clinical staff had to cancel more than 150 appointments after the Governor’s order, something she said creates “a health crisis on top of a health crisis.”
Ken Paxton’s next step was to claim that gun shops were essential businesses.
Then there is our Lt. Governor Dan Patrick. This guy is so business-friendly that he wants everyone to go back to work, saying that older people like him can “take care of ourselves.”
Leading the cast of dimwitted Republicans is our Governor, Gregg Abbot. He is so careful not to upset his campaign donors that he has yet to put in place a statewide stae-at-home order. In a recent NBC News article comparing actions by Democratic Governor’s responses to the coronavirus compared to Republican Governor’s, they highlighted several Republican Governors who are putting their citizens at risk.
Dominguez ranked Reeves, DeSantis and two other Republican governors at the bottom for failing to be proactive in the face of the crisis, for doing a poor job of executing the state’s response, and for being “too concerned about making sure that their messaging aligns with the President’s actions and recommendations on curtailing the virus.”
“Social distancing has not been a priority,” Dominguez said. “They have done a poor job on transparency.”
They are Kay Ivey of Alabama, and Greg Abbott in Texas.
Abbott has been criticized for not issuing a statewide stay-at-home order, although it was Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s suggestion that senior citizens would be willing to die for the U.S. to “get back to work” that made headlines.
“With the nation’s second-largest population, the highest uninsured rate in the country, and a legislature that doesn’t meet at all in even years, Texas is a state in which the governor’s role during a time of crisis is indispensable,” Hildebrand said. “Yet Abbott has ‘been’ behind the curve in nearly every protective measure – declaring a state of emergency, activating the National Guard, ramping up testing capacity, closing bars and restaurants.”
Additionally, Hildebrand said, Abbott “has shifted much of the emergency response to local municipalities.”
Neither I nor anyone else should be concerned about their health simply because we live in a