This is not a joke. This is what Texans must live through. A governor and his party that has Texas in a state of disarray.
Texas Governor needs electricity, not a wall
It was just a few months ago when Texas suffered one of its worst freezes ever. Hundreds of Texans died. And it exposed the perils of Texas Conservatism.
Governor Abbott and his Republican cronies have done nothing to make the situation better. Texans died from the cold in the winter. Now with the latest communique from ERCOT, they may die from the heat.
The state’s grid manager on Monday urged Texans to turn down thermostats and cut back electricity use as the combination of record demand and an unusually high number plant outages shrunk the reserve of available generation near critical levels.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas issued at least two conservation alerts as temperatures climbed into the mid-90s and demand headed toward a record 73,000 megawatts — well above the previous record for June of 69,123 megawatts in 2018. Meanwhile, more than 12,000 megawatts of generation went offline, about 15 percent of the system’s capacity of 86,000 megawatts and far above 3,600 megawatts of outages that ERCOT had forecast.
One megawatt can power around 200 homes on a hot summer day.
Instead of shoring up the state’s electric grid, needed infrastructure. Abbott wants to build a wall that those brown people will ultimately circumvent.
God help us, it’s Republican primary season in Texas.
That was clear on Thursday, when Gov. Greg Abbott held a border security summit in Del Rio.
“While securing the border is the federal government’s responsibility, Texas will not sit idly by as this crisis grows,” Abbott said, explaining that he intends to arrest more individuals crossing the border and form an interstate compact with Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey to tackle the migrant “crisis.”
He continued: “I will announce next week the plan for the state of Texas to begin building the border wall in the state of Texas.”
Abbott went on to refer to “border barriers” — a term that doesn’t suggest a physical, contiguous wall of the sort that Donald Trump so often called for, first as a candidate and then as a one-term president. And Abbott said he’ll give more information on his plan in the coming days.
In other words, Texans aren’t necessarily confronting the prospect of a costly and controversial border wall being built in the state; we’re just living with the reality of a governor who posits such things, for seemingly political reasons.
Since the Texas Legislature held its regular biennial session this year, Abbott could easily have designated border security as one of his emergency items for the session; he didn’t. Nor did he urge lawmakers to allocate funding for a border wall specifically — as they may well have done, given how many other partisan priorities sailed through the Legislature this session.
Will Republicans see that their politicians are a clear and present danger? Will they see that they are causing them permanent and deadly harm? Imagine if these Republicans realized that providing health insurance for the millions of Texans without child care and more are more humane than building a wall.
And guess what, a failing electrical grid will ensure the wall is not needed anyhow. Maybe Abbott wants to kill many birds with one stone.