At a campaign rally in San Antonio in early February, Beto O’Rourke inveighed against Governor Greg Abbott, directly blaming him for last winter’s deadly grid collapse and his coziness with Texas’ biggest energy players.
“We are all paying the price for this guy’s corruption and his incompetence,” he said.
Abbott and state lawmakers responded with a series of new grid regulations that energy experts say fall far short of what is needed to prevent another disaster. After pronouncing that “everything that needed to be done, was done” to fix the grid, Abbott then raked in millions of dollars in campaign contributions from power and gas companies. That was “pretty close to a bribe,” O’Rourke said.
