On issues as varied as voting access, abortion rights and vaccine mandates, the Biden administration is messing with Texas in a big way. And it should. How these multiple legal showdowns play out could have ramifications far outside the Lone Star State.
Texas is a nominally red state, but its cities are blue and getting bluer; it’s not inconceivable it could turn purple over the next few years. This makes the flurry of extremism emanating lately from the state’s GOP-held government even more disturbing, as it doesn’t represent some overwhelming ideological mandate from the whole of Texas’ citizenry.
It looks instead like the state’s Republican leaders are entrenching right-wing policies while they can and erecting roadblocks to prevent the future rise of Democratic officeholders.
Central to that mission is Texas’ recent new voting law, part of a slew of new election restrictions in Republican states premised on former President Donald Trump’s big lie of rampant voter fraud. The Texas law stymies mail-in voting and drop boxes, bans 24-hour and drive-thru voting, prohibits poll workers from providing assistance to voters who are disabled or non-English-speaking, and makes other changes that, not coincidentally, will disproportionately affect Democratic voters in urban areas. The Justice Department filed suit last week to challenge the law as an impediment to voting rights.
On the same day, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced plans to sue the administration over its approaching national vaccine mandate, which goes into effect Jan. 4. The mandate will require American businesses with more than 100 employees to ensure their workers are either fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, or that they test negative at least once a week.
Texas Republicans can’t claim that their opposition to that reasonable mandate is based on the conservative principle of non-interference in private business decisions — because they’ve already violated that principle themselves with Gov. Greg Abbott’s earlier executive order prohibiting Texas businesses from imposing their own vaccine mandates by choice. In essence, the Texas GOP is bound and determined to ensure that companies can’t keep their workers and customers safe, even if they want to, because that’s what the extremist base wants to hear.
All of this plays out against the approaching Supreme Court battle between the administration and Texas over the most draconian anti-abortion rights law in America. It literally offers a bounty to entice any plaintiff to sue any doctor who performs an abortion beyond about six weeks into a pregnancy, a point at which many women don’t even know they’re pregnant.
It’s urgent that the Biden administration win this multi-front war, because at its core is the question of what kind of country America wants to be. The Texas GOP’s answer — a country where women are second-class citizens, science is undermined and democracy is stymied — must not be allowed to go unchallenged.
———
