Asshole of the Month: Greg Abbott
After its successful war of independence from Mexico in 1836, Texas existed as an independent republic for nine years, until joining the United States in 1845. Then, in 1861, it seceded with the rest of the Confederate states to wage our bloody Civil War in defense of slavery. Ever since, there’s been a virulent suspicion of and opposition to the federal government in the Lone Star State.
Current Texas governor Greg Abbott has channeled this spirit into a stubborn defiance of Washington’s exclusive authority to regulate immigration. With “Operation Lone Star,” he launched a counter to illegal immigration along the U.S.-Mexico border beginning in 2021. Last year, he upped the ante, approving Senate Bill 4 in December, which allows state or local police to arrest illegal migrants and gives local judges the authority to order migrants to leave the country. The Justice Department is suing Texas over this rebellious law.
Abbott has bused illegal migrants to blue sanctuary cities—New York, Philadelphia, L.A., Washington and Denver—by the tens of thousands, overwhelming public services for poor and elderly people in those cities. He illegally placed a string of buoys festooned with sharp concertina wire in the middle of the Rio Grande. A federal judge declared it illegally deployed and forced him to remove it. Along with buoys, he erected miles of the same concertina wire along the shores of the Rio Grande, in Eagle Pass, Del Rio and other border towns. In Eagle Pass’s Shelby Park, this barrier—looking like something out of a WWI trench warfare scene—has prevented U.S. Border Patrol agents from accessing and processing migrants at these locations, including those with medical emergencies. A federal judge declared that border agents did not violate laws by cutting through the wire, and ultimately the Supreme Court sided with the Biden Administration, ruling that Texas could not interfere again with Border Patrol agents removing the wire.
In January, Abbott appeared on a podcast with former NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch and delivered this disgusting quip: “The only thing that we’re not doing is, we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because of course the Biden Administration would charge us with murder.” Actually, jackass, that would be murder in any country in the world, and any civilized administration on the planet would prosecute it as such. The Houston Chronicle was scathing about Abbott’s antics: “For Americans of a certain age, Abbott’s defiance has a familiar ring. It brings to mind Alabama’s ‘segregation forever’ governor, George Wallace, who in 1963 barred African-American students Vivian Malone and James Hood from registering at the University of Alabama.” How did then-President JFK react to this defiance? Enabled by Constitutional provisions, he federalized the Alabama National Guard and made it escort those two Black students onto campus. Biden could do the same thing with the Texas National Guard, if forced to, but that could prove akin to pouring gasoline on a smoldering fire.
