The title of this post is a shameless riff on this Michael Quinn Sullivan tweet:
In today’s Grand Pronouncement, your Texas King – Greg the Masked – has announced his Feudal County Lords may in their benevolence chose to allow a bar or nightclub to open, or not to open, based upon their whim.
Thank you, @GregAbbott_TX, for your Divine Leadership!
— Michael Quinn Sullivan (@MQSullivan) October 7, 2020
Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced that he’s finally going to let some bars reopen at 50% capacity, as opposed to the total closure they’ve been laboring under since March.
While other states like Florida are lifting the last of their coronavirus restrictions, Abbott is keeping his executive orders in place and continuing to keep some businesses closed.
On Monday, Abbott teased an upcoming announcement on Twitter which implied bars and other similar establishments—which have been barred from reopening alongside restaurants and other businesses—would finally be allowed to open their doors.
Abbott’s announcement on Wednesday, however, was less sweeping than many expected.
Instead, Abbott announced a new order that passes the buck onto county judges, who he has given the authority to determine whether local bars can reopen as soon as October 14 at 50 percent capacity.
For many Texans in populous Democrat-controlled counties, such approval will likely be difficult to obtain.
In fact, shortly after the announcement, Clay Jenkins—the Democrat Dallas County Judge—announced he would “not file to open them at this time.”
Williamson County is evidently opening back up, but I’m betting the Democratic judges overseeing Dallas, Travis, Harris, and Bexar counties are perfectly content to keep the remnants of their lockdown in place until the election, if not longer.
Up until this year, I was reasonably pleased with Abbott’s job as governor of Texas, though his cautious, consensus-driven brand of governance has been extremely frustrating for conservative activists who have seen many issues (such as the ban on taxpayer-funded lobbying) die in the legislature thanks to lack of support from the governor’s mansion. But I believe that Abbott’s overly cautious approach has severely hampered Texas’ recovery from the Wuhan coronavirus, especially when compared to Ron DeSantis in Florida, who has completely opened the state up rather than forcing business owners to play “Mother May I” with hostile county bureaucrats. It seems Abbott is more concerned with avoiding risk than doing the right thing.
Gov. Abbott, and Texas, can can do better
Tags: coronavirus, Dallas, Florida, Greg Abbott, Regulation, Ron DeSantis, Texas, Williamson County, Wuhan
Every America hater out there who is viscerally against any form of decency ever known to man only survives by the generosity, the safety and the comfort provided as part of our civilization by those better than his sorry, bottom feeder, leftoxenomorph nature.
And it is by our mistakes that those bottom feeders, feudal lords wannabees climb to positions of power to rule over us as if these were the medieval Dark Ages.
It is by our sufferance that they thrive and feast on our lives and come to think of this iniquity as the customary and dare to dream of a “new normal” where the covid con job will allow them a “great reset” to perfect their feudal rule over us and induce us to forget the concept of a Constitutional Republic to be replaced by a rising of the Swamp to cover us all turning the meek and the willing to submit into as many slave bottom feeders and the unwilling to genocide.
We are letting them do this to us because we are weak.
A poster doing the rounds of the net reads: “The Founding Fathers would have been stacking up corpses by now.”
And there you have it.
As simple as it gets.
That’s how we started.
Why change what works?
I have no use for Abbott any longer. He thinks liberals in Austin will love him for his caution approach, but in reality they will always hate his guts. Now after proving he is nothing but a wishy-washy wimp, his conservative base hates his guts.
Nice job punting the ball.
This is all so amusing. How quickly we forget: the alternative to Abbott isn’t someone more conservative, it’s someone like Wendy Davis.
Ronaldus Magnus himself said, put up the most conservative candidate that can win. That’s two variables you’re optimizing against.
I’m not saying we should tolerate RINOs. I will say, compare him to other governors dealing with the same challenges.
… and as to passing the buck to county officials … that sure sounds like federalism, doesn’t it? A bit like states’ rights?
Instead of one executive deciding for all, let the decision happen in the most local (and therefore most accountable) location possible.
Plus, the needs of Snook and the needs of Houston are vastly different, as are the needs of Laredo or Amarillo. Let the locals decide, and be held accountable by their constituents.
Sounds like the residents of certain counties will get it good and hard for electing Democrats.
And drunk driving will make a HUGE jump.
I’m not from Texas, but I have family there and I like Texas in general. Y’all really need to get yourselves a Republican governor.
One other note regarding Florida. Early on DeSantis took the position that the State would make recommendations, but relatively few mandates because Florida is too big and the conditions in Miami-Dade and Okeechobee counties are just too different for a one-size fits all approach. I thought that made great sense. Then as things got worse he felt the heat and imposed some mandates, then relaxed them as soon as he could, then slapped on more when the summer surge hit. He has now lifted all state restrictions, but county restrictions remain in place in some places like Miami-Dade and Palm Beach Counties.
Longtime conservative blogger here. You could look it up.
You might think it’s really witty to compare governors to monarchs and wildly exaggerate the relationship between citizens and officials because this issues gets your knickers in a twist, but this is not merely a bit over-the-top, it is ludicrous.
When you decide to have discussions rather than mirror SNL and late-night comedians – just from the other side – some people will be willing to engage. Until then you’re just performing onstage.
Once the mask mandate came down I lost all faith in Abbot (not that I had much faith in any politician to actually give a dang about the constituents that elected them to start with). He needs to be removed (primaried at the least!) and a real leader take over. I moved from Austin four years ago to north of Dallas due to work, wanted to come back but now that the leftist nutjobs are in charge, I may just move elsewhere in TX – or FL, since the governor appears mostly sane. This saddens me to no end – Austin is my home but the leftists are hell bent on destroying everything good in that city. I guess the only thing evil can do is twist and destroy something good, to paraphrase C.S. Lewis.
The “King” comment is an increasingly common Texas political trope, not just very Abbott’s latest case of the slows, but for exercising authority not clearly vested in him by the Texas Constitution by promulgating decrees with the force of law (such as awarding an emergency, no-bid, multi-million dollar contract for contact tracing) . Early on, when it appeared the virus was more deadly than it turned out to be, there may have been some emergency powers justification. But given mounting evidence that it’s not nearly as deadly as first thought, and that Abbott has not called an emergency session of the legislature to pass actual laws, he has been incredibly slow about lifting those decrees.