Howdy! Hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving! I spent six days up in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, visiting relatives and buying some 180 books, some for myself and some to deal. Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm!
We keep hearing that it’s impossible rig government unemployment statistics, but something funny is going on.
A superficial take of today’s jobs report would note that both jobs and earnings “blew past expectations, flying in the face of Fed rate hikes”, and while that is accurate at the headline level, it couldn’t be further from the truth if one actually digs a little deeper in today’s jobs numbers.
Recall that back in August, September, and October we showed that a stark divergence had opened between the Household and Establishment surveys that comprise the monthly jobs report, and since March the former has been stagnant while the latter has been rising every single month. In addition to that, full-time jobs were plunging while part-time jobs were surging and the number of multiple-jobholders soared.
Fast forward to today when the inconsistencies not only continue to grow, but have become downright grotesque.
Consider the following: the closely followed Establishment survey came in above expectations at 263K, above the 200K expected – a record 7th consecutive beat vs expectations – and down modestly from last month’s upward revised 284K…
… numbers which confirm that at a time when virtually every major tech company is announcing mass layoffs…
… the BLS has a single, laser-focused political agenda – not to spoil the political climate at a time when Democrats just lost control of the House as somehow both construction (+20K) and manufacturing (+14K) added jobs according to the BLS, when even ADP now reports that these two sectors combined shed more than 100,000 workers in November.
Alas, there is only so much the Department of Labor can hide under the rug because when looking at the abovementioned gap between the Household and Establishment surveys which we have been pounding the table on since the summer, it just blew out by a whopping 401K as a result of the 263K increase in the number of nonfarm payrolls (tracked by the Household survey) offset by a perplexing plunge in the number of people actually employed which tumbled by 138K (tracked by Household survey). Furthermore, as shown in the next chart, since March the number of employed workers has declined on 4 of the past 8 months, while the much more gamed nonfarm payrolls (goalseeked by the Establishment survey) have been up every single month.
What is even more perplexing, is that despite the continued rise in nonfarm payrolls, the Household survey continues to telegraph growing weakness, and as of Nov 30, the gap that opened in March has since grown to a whopping 2.7 million “workers” which may or may not exist anywhere besides the spreadsheet model of some BLS (or is that BLM) political activist.”
A non-profit bankrolled by some of the nation’s largest corporations and left-wing billionaire George Soros is conducting a racial census of House and Senate staff as part of its effort to establish a “Bipartisan Diversity and Inclusion Office,” according to internal emails obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Senate and House staff received emails from a researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies starting in July asking them to confirm their “racial and ethnic identity” as part of an alleged data collection effort. In at least two cases, senior congressional staffers who declined to provide their races were told by the researcher that the organization’s current data indicated they “may identify as white” and asked the staffers to update if the information was incorrect.
Information collected by the group will be used in its annual report that lobbies for “structural changes on Capitol Hill that would allow for more people of color to be hired in senior positions,” a previous report from the group states. That report is made possible in part by millions of dollars in donations to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies from Apple, Google, Meta, Pfizer, the Soros-backed Open Society Foundation, among dozens of other large corporations and nonprofits.
The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies’ survey is part of a broader trend by left-wing organizations to pressure workplaces and governments to increase affirmative action policies. Often couched in promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” those policies have received criticism for coming at the expense of competence and offering advantages based on race instead of merit.
Rush was charged with a second-degree felony, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon family violence. An emergency protection order was issued against him, and he was soon back on the streets after making a $40,000 bond, KVUE reported.
“For $4,000, you can get out, go home, watch Netflix after trying to murder your ex-girlfriend — are you kidding me?” one of the customers said.
So in addition to aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and possible attempted murder, our super-genius lawyer also violated section 46.03 of the Texas penal code by carrying a gun into a bar. And he bonded out. For all that Democrats blather about “gun violence,” they don’t seem top treat gun felonies with any seriousness when they actually occur. Thanks, Soros-backed DA Jose Garza!
But it turns out that Rush didn’t just go go home to watch Netflix, as he was found dead on Thursday.
In one meeting, Deon Jackson went from South Carolina’s Berkeley County school superintendent to unemployed.
His firing came at the hand of a newly-elected school board, which appears to have declared a judgment day for woke practices in its district.
In its first meeting after the Nov. 8 election, the board fired superintendent Jackson and school counsel Tiffany Richardson. Then it hired Anthony Dixon as superintendent and retained Brandon Gaskins as counsel. And before the day was over, the board banned teaching critical race theory and created a board to review library books for pornographic content.
Moms for Liberty, an activist group that supports parental rights in education, endorsed six of the board’s nine members. Many Moms for Liberty candidates won school board elections this November.
Speaking of disinformation, CNN carries out more mass layoffs, including Chris Cillizza. Let’s have a moment of silences for his careerOK that’s enough.
Legal Insurrection conducts a 2024 presidential preference poll. Not surprisingly, DeSantis comes in first and Trump second. Nikki Haley third over Ted Cruz is a mild surprise. Greg Abbott ranked dead last, tied with Liz Chaney, is a much bigger one.
State budgets for Texas and California are in the news, and once again the two largest states in the union are headed in opposite directions:
In Texas, lawmakers are wrangling about what to do with a $27 billion surplus.
The Texas Legislature is in for a fight over how to spend its expected pot of money from inflation-driven record consumption tax collections.
Trying to direct the Legislature and the Texas House specifically often resembles herding cats — 150 members with 150 different ideas on how the $27 billion projected surplus should be appropriated.
Comptroller Hegar indicated this week that the total might grow even more by the New Year. He will provide an updated certified revenue estimate in January.
Whether it grows or not, the sum will be a large pot with which the Legislature can do a lot.
The foremost suggestion is to buy down property taxes through ramped-up compression of local ad valorem tax rates.
Gov. Greg Abbott has called for spending “at least half” on “the largest property tax cut ever in the history of Texas.” Lt. Governor Dan Patrick first called for using $4 billion to cut taxes and then upped that to possibly more than half of the total.
The Legislature already has $3 billion earmarked for a buydown next session from holdover American Rescue Plan Act funds.
That’s the estimated deficit Gov. Gavin Newsom and state lawmakers will confront when crafting a budget for the upcoming fiscal year, the Legislature’s nonpartisan fiscal advisor announced Wednesday.
The projection marks a stunning reversal from back-to-back years of unprecedented prosperity: The budget for California’s current fiscal year clocked in at a whopping $308 billion, fueled by a record $97 billion surplus that was by itself enough to treat every state resident to a $7,500 vacation. The year before, Newsom and lawmakers approved what was at the time a record-busting $263 billion budget that included a $76 billion surplus.
Snip.
The Legislative Analyst’s fiscal outlook doesn’t take into account soaring inflation rates or the increasingly likely possibility of a recession. Due to inflation, “the actual costs to maintain the state’s service level are higher than what our outlook reflects,” the analyst’s office wrote. The estimated $25 billion deficit thus “understates the actual budget problem in inflation-adjusted terms.” And, if a recession were to hit, it would result “in much more significant revenue declines,” meaning California could bring in $30 to $50 billion less than expected in the budget window.
I don’t think there’s any “if” about a recession anymore.
For a while California’s tech and entertainment industry strengths were outrunning its massive blue state economic mismanagement and green energy delusions. That’s no longer the case.
The problem with the blue state model is that they either run out of other people’s money, or people take it with them when they move before the state can take it away. Still others leave to avoid the outrageous cost of living. No wonder U-Haul ran out of trucks to leave the state.
Budgets are hard to balance even in good times, given competing priorities and political factions. It becomes much harder in a recession. And it becomes nearly impossible when you try to fund not only the regular Democratic Party graft and fraud, but social justice madness and green energy delusions.
Which is why so many Californians are getting out while the getting is good…
Incumbent governor Greg Abbott walloped Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke by about a point less than he walloped Lupe Valdez in 2018, the year O’Rourke got within three points of Ted Cruz in the Texas senate race. 2018’s Betomania seems to have slightly raised the floor for Democrats in various down-ballot races, but not enough for them to be competitive statewide. This is O’Rourke’s third high-profile flameout in five years, and one wonders whether out-of-state contributors are getting wise to the game.
Vote totals seem down a bit from 2018, with the governor’s race drawing about 266,000 fewer voters.
Incumbent Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick increased the margin by which he beat Mike Collier (also his opponent in 2018) from about five points to about ten points.
For all the talk of Ken Paxton being the most vulnerable statewide incumbent, he also won his race over Rochelle Garza by about 10 points, as opposed to a three and half point victory over Justin Nelson (a man so obscure he has no Wikipedia entry) in 2018. (Thought experiment: Could Beto have beaten Paxton this year? My gut says his money would have made it a lot closer than his race with Abbott, but I think he still would have lost by about the same margin he lost to Ted Cruz in 2018. But his lack of a law degree would have worked against him, and I doubt his ego would ever consider running in a down-ballot race like AG…)
In the Comptroller, Land Commissioner and Agriculture Commissioner races, Republicans were up a bit around 56%, and Democrats were down a bit more. (And Dawn Buckingham replacing George P. Bush should be a big improvement.)
Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian had the biggest spread between him and Democratic opponent Luke Warford, 15 points (55% to 40%).
Three Republican statewide judicial race winners (Rebeca Huddle in Supreme Court Place 5, Scott Walker in Court of Criminal Appeals Place 5, and Jesse F. McClure in Court of Criminal Appeals Place 6) were the only statewide candidates to garner 4.5 million or more votes (possibly due to the absence of Libertarian candidates).
In the House, the GOP grew its ranks by one — giving them an 86-to-64 advantage in the 150-member chamber for the 2023 legislative session. The Senate has 31 members, and Republicans previously outnumbered Democrats 18 to 13. The GOP will hold at least 19 seats next session. Democrats will hold at least 11, though they are leading in one Senate race that is still too close to call.
The Republicans’ victories were felt prominently in South Texas, where the GOP won key races after targeting the historically Democratic region of Texas after Democratic President Joe Biden underperformed there in 2020.
In House District 37, now anchored in Harlingen, Republican Janie Lopez beat Democrat Luis Villareal Jr. The seat is currently held by Democratic state Rep. Alex Dominguez, who unsuccessfully ran for state Senate rather than seek reelection. The district was redrawn to cut out many of the Democratic voters in Brownsville from the district to the benefit Republicans. Biden carried District 37 by 17.1 points in 2020 under the old boundaries, but would have won by only 2.2 points under the new map.
Lopez would be the first Latina Republican to represent the Rio Grande Valley in the House.
In another major South Texas victory, Rep. Ryan Guillen of Rio Grande City, who defected from the Democratic Party and ran this cycle as a Republican, won reelection handily.
In another crucial battle in southern Bexar County, which has traditionally been dominated by Democrats, Republican incumbent John Lujan prevailed over Democrat Frank Ramirez, a former San Antonio City Council member.
Who did well? Incumbent Republican congressman Dan Crenshaw. Remember this ad from 2020? In addition to Crenshaw winning reelection by some 73,000 votes, August Pfluger and Beth Van Duyne won reelection to their districts, and Wesley Hunt, who ran a close-but-no-cigar race for TX7 in 2020, managed to win the race for newly created TX38 this year. (My guess is that, just like Rep. Byron Donalds (FL19) and Rep. Burgess Owens (UT4), Hunt will be blocked from joining the Congressional Black Caucus.)
Is there any sign of black support for Democrats eroding? A bit. In 2018, Democratic Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (one of the very dimmest bulbs in congress) received 75.3% of the vote from her black and Hispanic majority district. In 2020, she received 73.3%. In 2022 (post redistricting), she received 70.7%. Slow progress, but progress none the less.
Leftwing fossil Lloyd Doggett was elected to his fifteenth term in congress, crushing his Republican opponent for the newly created 37th congressional district, while communist twerp Greg Casar (formerly of the Austin City Council) was elected to the 35th, formerly Doggett’s prior to redistricting.
Tarrant County had been trending more purple recently, going for O’Rourke over Cruz there by about 4,000 votes in 2018, and going for Biden over Trump by a mere 2,000 votes (less than .3%). But Abbott beat O’Rourke there by some 25,000 votes.
Jefferson County (Beaumont) is another county that’s flipped back. It went for O’Rourke over Cruz by about 500 votes,and flipped back to Trump over by around 500, but Abbott walloped O’Rouke by over 8,000 votes this year.
The runoff in the Austin Mayoral race will be on December 13 between hard lefty Celia Israel, and soft lefty retread Kirk Watson. If Watson picks up a clear majority of third place finisher Jennifer Virden’s voters (which seems likely), he should win.
This is a side effect of Williamson County, formerly a reliable Republican bulwark, becoming decidedly more liberal as Austin has become a hotbed of radical leftism. Abbott still edged O’Rourke by some 2,000 votes here, but Biden beat Trump by about 4,000 votes in 2020.
If 1978 is the year this election reminds me of nationally, then 1984 is the template year for Texas politics. In 1982, Phil Gramm resigned after Democrats threw him off the House Budget Committee (because why would you want a professional economist on a budget committee?), switched parties, and ran for his own vacancy in a special election as a Republican, winning handily.
Gramm’s switch showed that the time for conservatives to remain welcome in the Democratic Party was drawing to a close, and the way he resigned to run again rather than just switching made him a folk hero among Texas republicans. In 1984, Gramm ran for the senate, walloping Ron Paul, Robert Mosbacher, Jr. (a sharp guy who eventually did better in business than politics) and former Texas gubernatorial candidate Hank Grover in the Republican primary before decisively beating Lloyd Doggett (yep, the same one that’s still in congress) in the general by some 900,000 votes.
Gramm’s victory showed that the political careers of conservative Democrats who switched to the Republican Party could not only survive, but thrive. Between 1986 and the late 1990s, a series of high profile conservative Texas Democrats (including Kent Hance and Rick Perry) would switch from an increasingly radical Democratic Party to the GOP.
So too, this year showed that Hispanic Democrats could leave a party increasingly out of tune with people they represented (largely hard-working, law-abiding, entrepreneurial, conservative, and Catholic) for the Republican Party and win. Republicans may not have flipped terribly many seats in south Texas, but except for recent special election-winner Myra Flores, they held their gains.
The combination of Trump’s distinct appeal to working class Hispanics, deep opposition to disasterous Democratic open borders policies, and Gov. Abbott’s long term dedication to building out Republican infrastructure there have all primed Hispanics to shift to the GOP. Just as it took years for all Texas conservatives and most moderates to abandon the Democratic Party (Republicans wouldn’t sweep statewide offices until 1998), it will take years for the majority of Hispanics to switch.
But if Democrats continue to push open borders, social justice, radical transgenderism, soft on crime policies, high taxes and socialism, expect Hispanics to make that switch sooner rather than later.
That’s my Texas race roundup. If you have any notable highlights you think I should have covered, feel free to share them in the comments below.
Greetings, and welcome to a special Election Eve Monday LinkSwarm! My Internet is back up, and tomorrow night I will be liveblogging the election returns starting around 7 PM.
For the past week or so, my back-of-the-envelope math envisioned a GOP House majority somewhere between 229 and 241, and I’m sticking to that. Give the Republicans the 212 seats in Cook Political Report, with two-thirds of the 35 races in the toss-up category, and you end up with 235 Republicans and 200 Democrats, so put those down as my final prediction numbers.
Snip.
With Bolduc, Laxalt, and Johnson winning, I come out to a 51–48 GOP advantage by the end of the week, with Walker and Warnock headed to a runoff. It wouldn’t shock me if Oz or Masters or both won, giving Republicans a 53- or 54-seat majority.
On Sunday, Hilary Rosen, a longtime Democratic strategist, predicted on CNN’s “State of the Union” that her party will have a bad night on Tuesday because they did not listen to voters.
“I’m a loyal Democrat, but I am not happy. I just think we did not listen to voters in this election, and I think we are going to have a bad night,” she said.
She faulted the Democratic Party for ignoring voters’ concerns about the economy, and implored them to “stop talking about democracy being at stake.”
“When voters tell you over and over and over again that they care mostly about the economy, listen to them,” she said. “Stop talking about democracy being at stake. Democracy is at stake because people are fighting so much about what elections mean. Voters have told us what they wanted to hear. I don’t think Democrats have delivered this cycle.”
Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson gave the federal prosecutor probing Hunter Biden a little nudge Wednesday — sending him more than 200 pages of bank records showing millions in transactions between the first son’s companies and Communist Chinese-tied entities.
Snip.
The senators’ analysis of banking records, first reported by Fox News, finds that between August 2017 and October 2018, $6 million was transferred to a company allegedly set up by Hunter Biden called Hudson West III, $5 million came from Northern International Capital, a [Chinese energy compan] CEFC affiliate, and $1 million was transferred from CEFC itself.
From the pool of cash, $4.8 million was transferred from Hudson West III to other Biden companies, such as Owasco P.C. and Owasco LLC, and to a company associated with President Biden’s brother James, the Lion Hall Group.
The bank records also show that Hunter Biden and his aunt and uncle, Sara and James Biden, went on a “spending spree,” in the senators words, after Hudson West III received the millions in payments from CEFC, through a line of credit that was opened.
“We are also providing bank records showing that credit cards were collateralized by a $99,000 preauthorized withdrawal from Hudson West III,” Grassley and Johnson write, noting that the money was spent for airfare, at Apple stores, hotels, and restaurants, as they detailed back in 2020.
Grassley and Johnson also mention two $3 million wire transfers sent to Robinson Walker LLC, another Hunter Biden-associated company; and by State Energy HK Limited, another CEFC affiliate, saying the purpose of those transfers “is unclear.” The Post reported on those mysterious transactions back in 2020.
The senators also make reference to JiaQi Bao, Hunter Biden’s Chinese secretary, who reportedly pushed for “Uncle Joe” Biden to run for president and has been linked to the Chinese government. The bank transactions included in Grassley and Johnson’s letter show that Hunter Biden made payments to Bao totaling $29,795.84 after Hudson West III received the $6 million from the Chinese firms.
Some names and entities will be familiar to BattleSwarm readers, but other bits are new.
Ballot harvesting, according to the California Democrats who’d like to take it national, is an innocent practice where union members and activists, some of them illegally present in the country, do voters the favor, see, of helping voters fill out their ballots and then collecting those ballots for them so that they need never go to the polls. They call it “a new service.” It’s part of their “make every vote count” agenda, and who could be against that?
But out in Florida, where there’s still some semblance of objectivity, investigators found another story.
According to the Washington Times:
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Florida’s newly created Office of Election Crimes and Security is requesting a criminal investigation into charges of ballot harvesting in Orlando, a Democratic stronghold in the critical swing state.
Cynthia Harris, a Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for District 6 commissioner in Orange County, which includes Orlando, provided a sworn complaint to the election crimes office, alleging left-leaning organizations have been perpetrating a scheme to encourage residents in black neighborhoods to apply for mail-in ballots and to fill out those ballots, which she said have been collected by paid canvassers, and sometimes altered, all in violation of state law.
In an interview with The Washington Times, Ms. Harris said she has video evidence of paid ballot harvesters operating in Orlando neighborhoods in both 2014 and 2017, and that the scheme has been going on for decades, continuing through the 2020 election and the 2022 primary.
If voting fraud is this massive in Florida, how widespread and massive is it in states controlled by Democrats? (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
Two members of Congress from Texas and one former Trump administration official who now serves in the Texas House of Representatives are asking for answers from the Biden administration after discovering that an open borders group funded by George Soros received millions of dollars in federal grant money last year.
Alianza Americas, a nonprofit that says it is “committed to a human rights agenda for all people, with an emphasis on the inclusion and support of Latin American immigrant communities, and people on the move in Latin America,” received $7.5 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in February 2021, according to the Washington Examiner, and then another $1 million from the Health Resources and Services administration in July.
Both organizations fall under President Joe Biden’s Health and Human Services organization, and both grants were to fund COVID relief and vaccination efforts.
The group has also received nearly $1.4 million from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation from 2016 through 2020.
Federal law prohibits government grant money from being spent on lobbying, but Alianza Americas may have violated that prohibition in its activities as a “political advocacy group,” according to a letter from former HHS Chief of Staff Brian Harrison.
Chicago teacher’s unions want to pass an Illinois state constitutional amendment that would basically let them run the state.
If approved by Illinois voters in November, Amendment 1 will give government teachers’ unions an unfettered constitutional right to demand not just anything in their interests, but in what they see as the interests of every Illinoisan. The amendment is not limited to employee matters at the workplace.
Don’t take my word for that. Look at the first sentence of the argument in favor of it as written in the official summary as published by the Illinois Secretary of State: “This amendment will protect workers’ and others’ safety.” [Emphasis added.]
hat particular sentence is just about safety, but it shows the broad interpretation of the amendment beyond the workplace that government unions will assert. The language of the amendment itself supports that broad interpretation, and will extend to anybody’s “economic welfare,” which is pretty much everything.
What will government unions, especially radical teachers’ unions, demand with that new constitutional right?
The Chicago Teachers Union has long been quite open about its purpose. It sees itself as the vanguard of a national movement, led by unions like itself, that is textbook Marxism.
That purpose is well documented. It goes beyond the radical curriculum they teach in schools and encompasses an entire rearrangement of how America works.
Among the first things we wrote about on this site, ten years ago, was the role of the CTU and other teachers’ unions at a Marxism conference held that year:
The event was teeming with teachers who spoke about the new found bond” between Socialism and teachers’ unions according to reports, and Chicago teachers were on the stage. Chicago Teachers Union [then] VP Jesse Sharkey spoke at one breakout session. Becca Barnes, a Chicago Teachers Union teacher and organizer with Chicago Socialists, proclaimed at the beginning of the conference that “the struggle here in the United States has entered a new phase. Nowhere have we pointed the way forward more clearly than here in Chicago with the teachers union strike….”
Since then, militant radicalism has become still more firmly embedded in the CTU. That history is well documented – quite proudly by radicals themselves. The International Socialist Review, for example, lays out a good history of the CTU, saying the CTU “transcended a simple labor dispute and was transformed into a social movement, with the teachers fusing their struggle with that of the community they serve…joining in the Occupy Chicago movement that pointed out the root of societal problems—social and economic inequality.”
A poll that shows ridiculously low support from black voters for defunding the police should be the final nail in the coffin for Democrats’ anti-law and order campaign of the last seven years.
TheGrio.com commissioned a poll, along with the Kaiser Family Foundation, which found that 82% of black respondents want police funding either to be kept about the same (48%) or increased (34%). Only 17% wanted it decreased.
It’s just like Kari Lake said in a recent confrontation with a reporter. If you go into most black neighborhoods and talk about defunding the police, they’ll look at you “like you’re the craziest person on the planet.” But it’s one thing for a white, conservative Republican to say it — it’s far more important to hear black respondents in a poll confirm it overwhelmingly.
Things that make you go “hmmmm“: “San Francisco DA Won’t Release Police Bodycam Video, 911 Calls From Paul Pelosi Attack.”
Great line in the middle of this Ben Shapiro election roundup video: “Andrew Cuomo came to kill all the old people and grab ass, and he ran out of old people.”
Remember all those stories of how bad it sucked for workers in Foxconn’s iPhone factory? It’s worse now.
Hundreds and perhaps thousands of workers fled a Chinese manufacturing complex that accounts for 85% of iPhone assembly capacity. The mass migration, which began this weekend, called into question that country’s COVID-control measures and, more broadly, its reliability as a part of global supply chains.
“Something snapped over the weekend,” Bloomberg News reports. Employees suddenly fled the Zhengzhou plant of Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. Ltd., better known as Foxconn. Videos show, in what is now called the “Foxconn Great Escape” or the “iPhone Long March,” workers scrambling over high chain fences at the plant, known as “iPhone City.”
To avoid detection, workers traveled through cropland by day. At night, they took to the roads. “Some people were walking amid wheat fields with their luggage, blankets, and quilts,” said a poster on WeChat, the popular Chinese social media platform. “I couldn’t help but feel sad.”
Residents of neighboring areas rallied, for instance leaving water and provisions in the open on roadsides. Social media postings reported signs such as “For Foxconn workers returning home.”
Truckers also pitched in. Risking criminal prosecution, they took workers in pick-up, dump, and flatbed trucks. One video shows a woman standing on the back of a big tank truck speeding down a highway in the rain.
Workers fled Foxconn’s “closed loop” system, which isolated the plant from the rest of society. Inside the loop, the company went to great lengths to stop COVID. As a disease-control measure, it had ended canteen service on October 19, forcing workers to eat boxed food in dormitory-style sleeping quarters. Food was reportedly scarce, and conditions in the dorms rapidly deteriorated. On Sunday, Foxconn announced it would resume cafeteria dining.
The political establishment—left and right—want desperately to move on, to pretend the last 30 months didn’t happen. With very few exceptions (Ron DeSantis, Kirsti Noem, Rand Paul, Thomas Massie, Ron Johnson, and a few others, later), they betrayed their core values. Many Republicans and so-called Libertarians quickly capitulated the primacy and importance of individual liberties. Whereas supposedly equality-loving democrats embraced policies that in no uncertain terms screwed women, children and the poor. The 2020 democrat campaign slogan might as well have been “protect the rich, infect the poor.” Or “only the rich need to learn.” They’d all very much like that you forget about that. They’d like to go back to the fights they know how to fight, the golden oldies that turn the bases out, and turn us against each other. But COVID policies turned the whole thing on its side, jumbling us all up and resulting in all sorts of hitherto unheard of alliances. And when your business is maintaining the status quo, that is very dangerous.
Which is why Emily Oster is pleading for an amnesty.
First, let’s be clear to whom Emily Oster is speaking. She’s speaking to the furious well-educated suburban women who are swinging towards Republicans in this cycle, even in the bluest of states. Because it was the bluest of states that were hit hardest by these policies. It was in blue states that the schools were closed longest, that the economic devastation was worst, that crime spiked the most, where masks were required longest. The damage done by these policies is at its beginning, not its end. Dr. Oster, would like women to believe that it was all just a mistake, a mis-understanding, and remember that it is the Republicans who are looking to limit the freedoms that really count. That while democrats had no problem sacrificing the well-being of our living children for three years in support political power, it is Republicans that pose the real threat.
Blue city blues: “Nearly 20% Of Seattle Shootings Happened Near Homeless Encampments.”
Man who used to get all his information on conservatives from the mainstream media realizes he’d been lied to.
When I left the mainstream liberal media bubble & started listening to right-wing media to understand what they want, I became more aware of the world around me than ever before. Without the filter, I got to hear what conservatives actually believe & it's not what I was told.
— Adam B. Coleman, President of Aintblackistan (@wrong_speak) October 21, 2022
For a couple of days, I was at this conservative conference, everyone I spoke with was courteous and supportive and I felt completely comfortable. I didn't have people stare at me or give me the feeling that I wasn't welcome. Actually, quite the opposite.
— Adam B. Coleman, President of Aintblackistan (@wrong_speak) October 21, 2022
However, when I would go on Twitter, they would show clips from the event and reframed this benign conservative conference as being a "KKK rally". If Americafest was a KKK rally, then it was the lamest KKK rally ever.
— Adam B. Coleman, President of Aintblackistan (@wrong_speak) October 21, 2022
Wendell Perez received a call from the elementary school that would alarm any parent. School officials told him that his 12-year-old daughter had attempted suicide in the school’s bathroom. He was told it was because she wanted to be a boy, with a male name and pronouns.
Wendell couldn’t believe it. At home, his daughter hadn’t shown any signs of gender dysphoria or discomfort in being a girl. The Perez family is Catholic, and they raised their children with a biblical and scientific understanding of biological sex.
But when Wendell and his wife Maria arrived at the school, they found out that school officials had been having confidential meetings with their daughter and discussing her discomfort with her gender. Wendell and Maria found out that teachers and staff at school had begun treating their daughter as a boy at school without their consent or knowledge. Wendell was told by staff that they didn’t share information about his daughter’s “transition” with him or his wife because of “confidentiality issues.”
Whatever happened to in loco parentis? Or does that just not apply when there are radical transexual activists to mollify?
When the school called his 14-year-old son to the principal’s office for refusing to say a female student was a boy, Matthew Duncan decided he’d had enough.
When the school called his 14-year-old son to the principal’s office for refusing to say a female student was a boy, Matthew Duncan decided he’d had enough.
“There was never a push towards dominance and control like it is now,” said Duncan. “You can’t voice your opinion.”
In response, many families in Grants Pass have withdrawn their children from public school, enrolling them in private school or starting to homeschool, Grants Pass teachers, school administrators and parents told The Epoch Times.
Meanwhile, in a civilized state: “Florida Bans Puberty Blockers and Transgender Surgery for Minors.”
Also, an O’Rourke rally too close to a voting location violated Texas law.
Still more Beto: “New poll shows Abbott gaining six points in eight weeks, 53/40.”
“More California companies moving headquarters out-of-state than ever before.” Texas once again tops the list of destination states, followed by Tennessee, Nevada, Florida and Arizona.
“Democrat Nominee In Arkansas Arrested For Felony Terroristic Threatening. Law enforcement officials in the state of Arkansas arrested Diamond Arnold-Johnson, the Democrat nominee for Arkansas auditor, on Friday for first-degree terroristic threats.” Bonus:
Arnold-Johnson’s husband was on trial in August for allegedly posting terroristic threats on Facebook, police said. During the trial, Arnold-Johnson, 32, admitted that she, not her husband, posted the threatening messages on Facebook that led to the criminal charges, KATV reported.
A warrant was served for Arnold-Johnson’s arrest on October 13, but she refused to comply and a SWAT team was dispatched to resolve the matter.
However, police made the decision to cancel using the SWAT team to force compliance from Arnold-Johnson in an apparent attempt to not risk an explosive situation happening right before an election.
I cannot believe democracy is about to die in America, again.
After years of living under a dictatorship, America rose from the ashes. Democrats took control of the Presidency, the House, the Senate, the university system, Big Tech, the entertainment industry, and major corporations – and thereby defeated fascism by seizing every major lever of power in the nation. With one-party rule established, and all of our critics silenced, democracy was once again free to flourish.
Now, our dear democracy is under attack – by America holding a so-called “election” and allowing idiots to vote. Let us be clear about what the stakes are: if a single person I disagree with is elected in a free and fair election, democracy will be DEAD. If citizens have the power to simply vote the ruling party out of power – when I really like the current ruling party – all is lost.
If you’re wondering about the 2022 Texas Gubernatorial Race between Republican incumbent Greg Abbott and Democratic challenger Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke, there isn’t one.
Gov. Greg Abbott’s lead is widening over Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke, according to two polls this week that show Republicans gaining ground ahead of the November midterm election.
This comes months after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade sent shock waves through the country and inspired a wave of left-leaning activism. The latest data indicates that energy around that ruling may be overshadowed by Republicans’ intense focus on border security, including their more recent efforts to bus migrants to Democratic-led cities.
The Spectrum News/Siena College poll showed Abbott with a 50-43 lead over O’Rourke, and other statewide candidates had similar gaps: Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick was up 49-40 over Democrat Mike Collier, and Attorney General Ken Paxton had a 47-42 lead over Democrat Rochelle Garza.
The poll also found that Texas voters consider immigration a more important issue than abortion. About 31 percent of respondents said immigration was their first- or second-highest concern ahead of the midterms, while 22 percent said the same for abortion.
Overall, Texans overwhelmingly consider the economy and inflation their highest priorities.
The Siena poll was conducted Sept. 14 through 18 as Abbott continues to draw national attention for busing thousands of migrants out of Texas and dropping them off in Washington, D.C., New York City and Chicago, in what he has described as an attempt to show President Joe Biden how grave the situation is at the border. The governor’s critics have characterized the program as a stunt that uses human beings as political pawns.
“The Biden-Harris administration continues ignoring and denying the historic crisis at our southern border, which has endangered and overwhelmed Texas communities for almost two years,” Abbott said last week.
About 52 percent of likely voters support the busing initiative, according to the Siena poll. Another 40 percent oppose the effort.
O’Rourke’s gubernatorial candidacy was always going to be a longshot in an off-year election that was going to favor Republicans. But the disasterous incompetence of the Biden Administration, spiraling inflation, the Biden Recession, resentment of wokeness, and deeply unpopular open borders policies that have pushed more and more Hispanics to switch to the Republican Party have turned the basic headwinds of an off-year election into a howling gale that’s going to blow O’Rourke to his third high profile defeat in five years. His three point loss to Ted Cruz in 2018, in a Trump mid-year election favoring Democrats, against a lightning-rod incumbent wounded by his own high profile defeat at the hands of Trump in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, looks like his best possible showing under any circumstances.
I expect O’Rourke to do better than Wendy Davis did in 2014, simply because he’s a better candidate (he’s too leftwing for Texas, but he does the hard work of campaigning, for which Davis showed little inclination) and because Democrats have poured a lot of money into building election infrastructure. But like Davis, he seems to have made the foolish decision to run as the Unlimited Abortion Candidate, expecting the overturning of Roe vs. Wade to sweep him into office. The problem with that theory is that everyone who was a single-issue voter on Unlimited Abortion was already voting for Democrats, and the people who aren’t seem to care more about such trivia as “paying for food for their children.”
O’Rourke may not even equal the 42.5% a sleepwalking Lupe Valdez garnered in 2018. My guess is that he’s going to end up with somewhere like 40-45% of the vote, another high profile flameout, and another giant bucket of Democratic donor money wasted on his campaign rather than being sent to candidates that might actually win.
Here in Texas, some of Governor Greg Abbott’s border security moves (like sending the National Guard to the border) have been derided as all hat and no cattle. But it appears that Abbott has scored a definite border security win.
According to a very interesting report by Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies, the record-sized 15,000-strong caravan has run into interference from the Texas governor and his counterpart in the adjacent Mexican state of Coahuila, who had the foresight to sign an agreement in April about border security. Bensman writes:
AUSTIN, Texas — When Mexico last week granted federal humanitarian travel permits to 15,000 U.S.-bound third-country migrants who’d formed the largest caravan in Mexican history, most planned to head straight to the border to cross illegally into the Texas towns of Del Rio and Eagle Pass.
But now those thousands of federal permit holders have collided with an unusual and wide-ranging Coahuila State police roadblock operation that is systematically halting buses carrying the migrants all over that state, detaining and deporting some, and thwarting federal government will.
Few, if any, of those thousands are finding their way over the Rio Grande into the Border Patrol’s Del Rio Sector. Mexican state police are blocking northbound commercial buses at the bus station in the Coahuila state capital of Saltillo, and at many other stations, and emptying migrants from trucks and vans at checkpoints on all roads leading into that state’s border cities of Piedras Negras, across from Eagle Pass, and Acuna, across from Del Rio, according to Mexican press reporting.
The migrants who thought they were a day or two away from crossing into Texas, where the Biden administration will admit most of them, are reported to be infuriated. In many cases, the state authorities are “deporting” the immigrants they catch, although it was unclear to where. The operations have sparked civil disobedience disturbances in Saltillo, protests elsewhere, and closure Tuesday of the international bridge between Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras when 100 of the caravan migrants tried to hop a train over and battled Mexican authorities who stopped them.
The migrants think they’re pretty entitled to enter the U.S. free of charge and vetting.
What happened here was that Abbott and his Mexican counterpart in Coahuila, Gov. Miguel Angel Solis, signed a security agreement two months ago to keep the border area secure.
The impetus for the agreement was Abbott’s shutdown of Texas-Coahuila border trade, with intense truck inspections that slowed commerce as Abbott’s troopers searched vehicles for evidence of migrant-smuggling.
It was a very Trumpian move on Abbott’s part to slow roll the Mexican trucks, and he received a lot of heat for it, but like many Trumpian moves, it worked by threatening something the other party desperately wanted (the economic security of Coahuila).
What drew headlines at the time was Abbott’s transport of illegal migrants to Washington, D.C., but the power move on his part was in the laborious truck inspections, which were a problem for the Mexicans. The Mexican governor wanted that stopped, because it was hurting the normal economic activity of Coahuila, and he (along with three other Mexican governors, according to Bensman) signed the agreement with Abbott to get it stopped.
That’s why the roadblocks and ship-backs in Coahuila, courtesy of Mexican state police, are going strong now. The Mexican state cops aren’t putting up with these caravans from the migrants from some 150 countries at the expense of their own economy. They’re breaking these cartels up and sending the migrants back, one truck at a time.
The president of Mexico permitted their sending, and Joe Biden, of course, had planned to welcome all comers. But the two governors wanted normal life to go on, and the Mexican governor got busy with his end of the bargain to put a stop to the whole thing right then and there.
Between this and the Texas lawsuit win against the Biden Administration’s policy of not detaining illegal aliens, the State of Texas has scored significant wins for border security and the rule of law this week.
If you wonder why conservative victories seem so few and far between sometimes, this story offers one explanation.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s former chief of staff Daniel Hodge is now a lobbyist for one of the biggest liberal organizations in the country.
After a long history with Abbott since serving on his campaign for attorney general in 2001, Hodge was promoted to chief of staff when Abbott first took office in 2015. The key position gave him an incredible amount of power as both an informal advisor to his boss and a liaison between the governor’s office and the state Legislature.
In 2017, it was announced that he was parting from the role. Shortly after, he became a registered lobbyist.
Since then, Hodge has quickly become one of the highest-paid lobbyists in the state of Texas, with lobby reports revealing he could be making up to $8,269,999 on his contracts.
One of his high-paying clients, however, raises questions about where the former Abbott staffer’s loyalties lie.
Reports reveal Hodge is receiving $200,000-$300,000 from the left-wing Tides Center, the sister organization that helps manage donations from the Tides Foundation.
First established in 1976 in San Francisco, the Tides Foundation says it is dedicated to “working to advance progressive causes and policy initiatives in areas such as the environment, health care, labor issues, immigrant rights, LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights and human rights.”
Look into pretty much any radical Social Justice Warrior issue destroying the quality of life for Americans (#BlackLivesMatter, defunding the police, CRT, radical transgenderism, Acorn, etc.) and you’ll generally find Tides Foundation somewhere in the background.
According to an analysis from Influence Watch, “Tides’ fiscally sponsored groups have been prominent in the anti-war movement, anti-free trade campaigns, gun control, abolition of the death penalty, abortion rights, and gay rights.”
The Tides Center is funded by major leftist foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
That brings up the question: What the hell was such a publicly conservative Governor as Greg Abbott doing with Hodge as his Chief of Staff?
I understand that lobbyists are hired guns, but this is like someone from the American Cancer Society leaving to work for R. J. Reynolds.
It’s impossible to imagine top aides to Ted Cruz or Dan Patrick going to work lobbying for George Soros. The fact that it happened to one of Abbott’s longest-serving aides (and the manager of his 2006 Attorney General reelection campaign) does not reflect well on his staffing judgment.
It shouldn’t need to be said, but it’s imperative that conservative Republican elected officials appoint conservative staffers to important positions. Progress towards conservative goals is all but impossible if you have foxes guarding the hen-house.
Due to redistricting, several of the races I vote in have changed.
U.S. 37th Congressional District: Jeremiah Diacogiannis. This is the Austin district carved out for Lloyd Doggett, so any Republican winning is going to be an uphill climb. I liked his questionnaire survey answers, and he seems solidly conservative.
Texas Governor: I’m voting for Don Huffines though I fully expect Greg Abbott to win handily.
Texas Lt. Governor: Dan Patrick. Patrick has made the occasional misstep, but he’s generally been a very solid conservative who successfully pushed conservative legislation through the Texas Senate, only to frequently see that same legislation die in the house.
Texas Attorney General: Ken Paxton. Paxton has done an extremely good job, successfully suing the Biden Administration on a wide variety of federal overreach issues, from vaccine mandates to border control failures.
Texas Criminal Court of Appeals, Place 5: Clint Morgan. This is the race where Texas Scott Walker got elected because his name was Scott Walker. Morgan’s been endorsed by True Texas, Eagle Forum, etc.
Texas State Board of Education Member District 5: Mark Loewe, who previously ran as a Libertarian. Opponent Robert Morrow is a conspiracy theorist and general jerk. I remember Morrow asking JFK assassination questions at a Robert Caro book signing I attended. He did not impress me as someone worthy of public office.
Texas State Senate District 24: Paul Reyes. This is a weird one. Both Trump and Cruz have endorsed Reyes opponent Pete Flores, but Reyes has been endorsed by Eagle Forum and Gun Owners of America.
Texas House District 136: Michelle Evans seems to have some solid conservative policy positions. Those of opponent Amin Salahuddin seem a lot more vague.
Williamson County Judge: Bill Gravell. I think he’s generally done a pretty good job.
Williamson County Court-At-Law #2 Laura Barker. Unlike some previous judges, she hasn’t been an embarrassment, she has some decent endorsements, and unlike her opponent, she has a website…
Williamson County 368th District Court: This one is very close. Right now I favor Will Ward by a whisker over Sarah Bruchmiller based on law enforcement endorsements, but I’m still reading up on the race.
When I surveyed readers about what they wanted to see covered, several voiced support for more state political news. And early voting ends Friday. So here’s a long-in-gestation post on the state of the Governor’s Race.
The problem is that, while I’d love to see a competitive Republican primary, I’m not sure there is one.
Despite Allen West claiming he’s in the lead (don’t buy it) and Don Huffines dropping a significant amount of direct mailers, this is not only Greg Abbott’s race to lose, at this point I doubt he’s even going to be drawn into a runoff.
Before we get to the details, let’s deal with the incredulity outside the state that Abbott is even in any sort of race at all. He’s a conservative Republican incumbent, isn’t he?
Incumbent? Yes. Republican? Yes. Conservative? By the standards of Democrat-run states, unquestionably. I’m sure the Republican residents of California, Michigan, New York and Washington would love to trade their Democratic governors for Abbott. But among conservative activists, there is a simmering resentment that Abbott hasn’t been nearly as conservative on a number of topics as he could be, that he’s “left money on the table” and talks a much better game than he’s actually accomplished.
But let’s start with the things Abbott has gotten right. Under Abbott, Texas has generally controlled spending, and the low tax and low regulation environment has seen the Texas economy recovery quickly from the Flu Manchu lockdown recession. So too has Texas continued to lure big companies and projects from other states to Texas, from Apple to Samsung to Tesla.
So too, Abbott has been on the right side of just about social issue. He’s been consistently pro-Second Amendment. Texas’ innovative abortion law was hailed by pro-life groups across the country. Abbott has talked a good game on the Biden Administration’s inability to secure the border, and got funding for border wall construction passed.
But a lot of conservative activists have accused Abbott of being all hat and no cattle. For example:
Take Abbott’s much-vaunted Operation Lone Star, an effort by the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas National Guard to secure the Texas border with Mexico. Sounds like a good idea, right? Well, the implementation leaves much to be desired:
“It was common knowledge inside the command group that [Operation Lone Star] is just a political stunt,” retired Command Sergeant Major Jason Featherston, who served as Senior Enlisted Advisor to the Texas Army National Guard, told Chronicles. “Do I think we should have soldiers on the border? Absolutely. But what’s gone wrong with this is that it was hastily done and poorly planned.”
Featherston was present at the birth of Operation Lone Star and retired from his career while overseeing the Texas Military Department’s largest branch (the Army National Guard), with 19,000 people under him. Featherston said that while he cares little for politics, his “number one priority in all of this is making sure soldiers get paid on time and get the equipment they need and that they and their families are treated the way they need to be treated.” A lot of that isn’t happening or has been fraught with setbacks.
The border guards lack of basic equipment, and many troops don’t even have access to portable bathrooms, Featherston said.
There is also the huge issue of the 2021 ice storm power outage. Obviously Greg Abbott doesn’t control the weather, but he does control appointments to ERCOT, and touted trendy renewable energy that proved inadequate for preserving baseline power needs during the emergency. All that said, the grid held up just fine during the most recent (far less severe) cold snap, which may eliminate the last hope of Abbott’s primary opponents (and Beto O’Rourke) to lay a glove on him.
While Abbott lifted Texas lockdown restrictions earlier than many states, he did issue a slew of constitutionally questionable mandates during the early states of the coronavirus pandemic, including lockdowns and mask mandates. He was also notably slower than governors like Ron DeSantis at lifting restrictions.
Abbott has frequently been criticized both for being more reactive on culture war issues like Critical Race Theory and transsexual genital mutilation procedures on children, and that he has relied on executive orders rather than pushing for special session bills to pass laws to rectify the problem.
Abbott has also been dinged for raising money in California, something Ted Cruz (rightly) dinged both David Dewhurst and Beto O’Rourke over.
There’s a lot of truth to some of these charges, but I also don’t think any of them will actually derail Battleship Abbott. With his huge name recognition, money advantage and polling currently showing him at 60%, I expect Abbott to win to the primary and slaughter O’Rourke in the general.
Ricky Lynn Perry, AKA “not that Rick Perry.” I cannot find either website or Twitter feed for this guy, so that link goes to a Texas Tribune article on him. Here’s his iVoter profile. He’s not a serious candidate, and I only mention him here so nobody gets fooled by seeing “Rick Perry” on the ballot.
Unsurprisingly, Abbott’s war chest tops the charts, with $62.6 million cash on hand, having raised nearly $1.5 million in the first 20 days of January. Abbott has also spent more than $4.5 million in the same period as he campaigns around the state, releasing mailers and radio and TV advertisements.
Solidly in second, Huffines raised more than $1.1 million in the same timespan, bringing his total cash on hand to $2.3 million. Huffines’ expenditures show more than $2.7 million spent as he crisscrosses the state campaigning to Texans.
Meanwhile, West raised $331,000 and maintains about $83,000 cash on hand as of January 20. West spent more than $230,000 in 20 days on campaigning and advertising as he traverses the state to speak with Texans.
The Texas Ethics Commission is not showing Prather’s January 31 report, only his previous report accounting for July-December 2021. During that time, the report shows Prather raised more than $100,000 and had around $20,000 cash on hand.
That little money for Allen West doesn’t show a candidate that’s ahead.
I’ve tried numerous times to get a meeting with the governor,” said Miller. “In the seven years that we’ve both been in our offices, I’ve never got a meeting with the governor, never got a phone call returned, never got an email or letter returned.”
Miller continued to express his frustration in Abbott’s lack of communication and explained just how difficult it is to get in contact with the governor.
“Well, it’s kind of like working with sasquatch,” said Miller. “Everybody knows he’s real and some people have seen him, but I’ve never seen him. I can’t get a meeting with him.”
I’ve gotten several direct mailers from Huffines, including one in which he states his opposition to Critical Race Theory and LGBT ideology. I’ve gotten none from Abbott (though he has sent me a zillion fundraising emails) or West (and a lesser number of fundraiser emails).
Another day, another lawsuit against the Biden Administration over unconstitutional federal overreach, in this case issuing a vaccine mandate for Texas National Guard troops that aren’t under federal control.
Gov. Greg Abbott sent a letter on Tuesday to Texas Military Department (TMD) Adjutant General Tracy Norris stating his intention to sue the Biden administration over its effort to mandate COVID-19 vaccinations for members of the Texas National Guard.
In August, Abbott issued an executive order prohibiting governmental entities from mandating “any individual to receive a COVID-19 vaccine,” but mandates over the Texas National Guard have been unclear.
Following a military-wide order in August from U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin mandating the vaccine, Norris issued a directive to members of the Texas National Guard that service members must meet the requirement or submit a request for a medical or religious exemption.
On November 30, 2021, Austin issued a memorandum that further stipulated “all members of the National Guard must be fully vaccinated for COVID-19 [. . .] in order to participate in drills, training and other duty conducted under title 32.”
In December, Abbott responded to Austin’s memorandum in a letter, saying, “If the federal government keeps threatening to defund the Texas National Guard, I will deploy every legal tool available to me as Governor in defense of these American heroes.”
TMD public affairs staff previously stated that guardsmen “serving on Title 10 orders” — those who have been called on active duty at the national level — were required to be in compliance with the vaccine mandate or request an exemption by December 15, 2021.
Unvaccinated members of the Texas National Guard could potentially lose drill and training pay as those funds come from the federal Department of Defense (DOD).
In his new letter, Abbott specified that it “addresses all Texas guardsmen who are serving in a Title 32 or a state active duty status,” rather than those under Title 10 orders.
“Unless President Biden federalizes the Texas National Guard in accordance with Title 10 of the U.S. Code, he is not your commander-in-chief under our federal or state Constitutions. And as long as I am your commander-in-chief, I will not tolerate efforts to compel receipt of a COVID-19 vaccine,” said the governor.
Abbott said that the “federal courts have the power to decide whether President Biden violates the U.S. Constitution’s Second Militia Clause by undermining my commander-in-chief power, instead of federalizing Texas’s guardsmen to use his own commander-in-chief power.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sent out a Tweet confirming the lawsuit:
Biden is NOT the commander-in-chief of the Texas Military Dep’t. That’s @GovAbbott’s job.
Biden is once again attempting to use federal power to bully state troops to get a Covid vax. This is wrong—and illegal. And I won’t let it happen.
— Attorney General Ken Paxton (@KenPaxtonTX) January 4, 2022
The text of the lawsuit itsself can be found here.
1. There has long been a clear and distinct line between when National Guardsmen are governed by state authority and when they are governed by federal authority. When National Guardsmen are serving the State, the federal government has no command authority. Neither the President nor federal military officials can order the Governor of Texas and state officials how to govern the Guardsmen under their command. Under the Constitution’s carefully crafted balance between federal and state sovereignty, only the State, through its Governor, possesses legal authority to govern state National Guard personnel who have not been lawfully federalized.
2. Defendants unilaterally severed the division between state and federal authority over the Army National Guard and Air National Guard by attempting to impose a mandatory COVID-19 vaccine policy (“Military Vaccine Mandate”) on Guardsmen under state control, and in violation of Texas state law. Rather than exercise their own authority and lawfully activate the President’s chain of command, Defendants have attempted to force state officers to do the work for them, in violation of both the U.S. Constitution and federal laws.
3. This is not a case demanding a position of pro- or anti-vaccine, nor is it a case that challenges any aspect of the federal government’s authority over National Guardsmen once that federal authority has been properly established. Instead, this case seeks protection from the federal government’s unconstitutional action to force Texas, through its Governor, to submit to federal orders and impose federally dictated disciplinary action on its National Guardsmen. “There is no military exclusion from our Constitution.” U.S. Navy Seals 1-26 v. Biden, No. 4:21-cv-01236, slip op. at 2 (N.D. Tex. Jan. 3, 2021). Therefore, Plaintiff Greg Abbott, in his official capacity as Governor of the State of Texas, and as Commander in Chief of the Texas National Guard, brings this suit to enforce rights guaranteed to the Governor and the State of Texas by the U.S. Constitution and federal statutes.
The Roberts Court has tended to show considerably deference to state rights and prerogatives, so expect Texas to prevail in this suit if it reaches that level. But who knows how lower courts will rule, or how long it will take the case to wind its way to the Supreme Court…
