Friday, March 11, 2022

This May Not Be The Winner…

...Abbott’s campaign thinks it is. In more ways than one:
“The recent attempt to criminalize a parent for helping their transgender child access medically necessary, age-appropriate healthcare in the state of Texas goes against the values of our companies,” the letter said. “This policy creates fear for employees and their families, especially those with transgender children, who might now be faced with choosing to provide the best possible medical care for their children but risk having those children removed by child protective services for doing so.”
Meanwhile: It's terribly cynical to say it now, in this context, but: if that caption isn't a campaign ad for Beto, it's political malpractice.  (The Lege specifically declined to legislate on this issue AT ALL in the last session.  For the AG to now declare it a criminal act is, once again, a bit beyond the reach of the AG's authority; to put it in terms the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals would recognize.) And it turns out Paxton is Trump, too: This is your reminder that Paxton is a lawyer, and should know better.  But winning his primary run-off is apparently all that really matters.  Also your reminder that's not the only thing going on in Texas: Mail-in ballots are now almost exclusively the province of those over 65, who presumably predominately vote Republican. "Election integrity" is going to bite the Texas GOP in the ass (this round was only primaries). Expect it to be completely overhauled in 2023. That's not going to be an unalloyed winner, either. Nobody ran on in it in the primaries, but I expect it to be an issue in the generals. Stack all this up and you've got some seriously ugly shit to throw at the GOP in Texas.  Does Abbott really want to be the governor of criminalizing families because of how they provide medical care to their children?  That argument worked when the idea was to keep government (schools, counties, cities) out of the decision of whether kids needed masks.  Now the government decides how children are offered medical care, and whether that decision is criminal?  Even people who wanted their kids to wear masks weren't investigated for child abuse.

Almost 12,000 people lost their votes because the new rules for mail-in ballots were too damned complicated?  (I'm a lawyer, I heard about the problems early on and tackled the new, complicated process just to request a mail-in ballot, then studied the new, complicated process for mailing it in correctly.  I can understand how 12,000 people screwed it up.  It was designed to create errors.)  That's gonna go over, as we used to say, like a flash flood in a Fizzies factory.  (Fizzies?  Think colored Alka-Seltzer without the salt, but with not much more flavor.  I dunno, we ate a lot of dumb things as kids.  It wasn't all worth being nostalgic over.)

I expect the judge to enter a state-wide temporary injunction, which gets turned into a permanent one if the courts don't overrule her.  I don't really imagine they will, despite the Texas Supreme Court ruling on SB8, because this one is based on Paxton's half-assed opinion that doesn't have a shred of credibility to back it up.  Which is the point of that hearing this morning.  Without strong factual grounds, Abbott's opinion gets tossed in the shredder.  If it takes his political career down with it, so much the better.
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