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Empty seats are seen in the House Chamber at the Texas Capitol in Austin on July 13 as Texas Democrats left the state to block sweeping new election laws.

It is now on track to enact one of the most restrictive voting laws in the country after an effort that has literally rendered the legislature unable to govern: Democrats fled the state to deprive the legislature of the quorum it needs to operate to protest the bill, leaving Texans without a representative governing body. In response, the Republican House speaker did not offer to negotiate a policy compromise, but has tried to arrest the Democrats who fled.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, meanwhile, has become a prominent national right-wing figure on both immigration and the pandemic.

He has waded into battles with the Biden administration over the US- Mexico border, setting off on a misleading quest to construct a wall on his own (the taxpayer funds he’ll use for the effort are enough for only a few miles of wall, at most) and falsely claiming that migrants are behind Covid-19 surges. And as the delta variant is infecting almost 12,000 Texans a day in reported tests, he has also refused to reinstate mask mandates at the state level, banned local governments from doing so, and sued those that defy him.

Tamir Kalifa/Getty Images
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott holds a border security briefing with sheriffs from border communities in Austin on July 10.

It’s all a bid to keep the GOP base happy in the lead-up to next year’s midterm elections, as Republicans in the state are more concerned about potential primary challenges from the right than any serious offensive from Democrats. But with their focus on raising their political profiles and defeating potential rivals, they have forgotten to actually govern amid several statewide crises in recent months: the winter storm that left tens of thousands without power and in the cold, the arrival of increasing numbers of migrants at the border, and the recent resurgence of Covid-19 cases due to the delta variant.

According to Brendan Steinhauser, a GOP strategist based in Austin who ran Texas Sen. John Cornyn’s 2014 reelection campaign, Republicans are just doing their job by responding to what Texas Republican voters want: “The voters are driving Republican policies,” Steinhauser said.

But at some point, elected officials have a responsibility to protect the health and safety of their constituents and the basic human rights of anyone who passes through their state, even if it’s not what their base wants. Few Texas Republicans have embraced that sense of duty; state Rep. Lyle Larson, a Republican from San Antonio, has been a lone dissenting voice calling on his colleagues to “do the right thing with no expectation of getting re-elected” on issues like Covid-19, Medicaid expansion, and election law.

“We’ve come to a point where Republican elected officials in Texas treat their jobs like they’re Fox News contributors as opposed to people with responsibilities to their constituents,” said Zack Malitz, co-founder of the progressive Real Justice PAC and a former adviser on Democrat Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 Texas Senate campaign.

Malitz’s view reflects the general frustration of Democrats. But there is a limited amount they — or anyone concerned about Texas government — can do. The reality of how districts are drawn, as well as Texas Republicans’ push to restrict voting, means many of those GOP lawmakers with little interest in lawmaking are likely to hang on to their seats next year. And that means the problems Texans have faced due to their government’s neglect are likely to continue.

The Texas legislature is scoring political points at the expense of addressing the most pressing issues

For a while after the 2018 elections, Texas Republicans were focused on bread and butter issues like property taxes and school finance that wouldn’t offend many independents and Democrats. Democrats made some major inroads that year, not just retaking the US House, but also picking up 12 seats in the Texas House and two in the Texas Senate. That shook Republicans’ confidence a bit, and left them looking to play it safe.

But after Democrats’ predictions that they would turn Texas blue in 2020 failed to come to fruition, Republicans felt that they were given a mandate, marking the return of culture war-type issues that most energize their base in the Texas legislature.

“In Texas, Republicans still win statewide and have done so in the last couple of election cycles, even though we had some narrower races in 2018,” Steinhauser said. “If you’re a Republican running statewide, you still have to speak to the Republican Party first, not only to get the nomination, but to turn them out and win in November.”

That pressure has manifested in what Steinhauser described as the most conservative session of the state legislature in his memory. The governor has already signed legislation that removed permit requirements to carry a handgun and also established an effective ban on abortion that is currently facing legal challenges.

But there is also a special session of the state legislature underway where lawmakers are supposed to work on legislation that would prevent schools from teaching critical race theory or mandating masks or Covid-19 vaccines, and to provide funding for border security, among other Republican causes.

All the while, the failure of the Texas power grid during the winter storm — a statewide crisis that impacted Texans regardless of political party — has been glossed over. Though the governor signed laws to prepare the electrical grid to withstand future extreme weather events, the legislature hasn’t passed any bills delivering direct relief for consumers who were slammed with huge electricity bills as a result of the blackouts or making the kind of forward-looking structural changes to Texas’s electricity market that many experts have called for. 

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Wendy Rodriguez (right) joins a rally to protest proposed voting bills on the steps of the Texas state Capitol on July 13.
Mark Felix/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke (right) marches with Luci Baines Johnson (center), the daughter of former President Lyndon B. Johnson, during a voting rights rally near the Texas State Capitol on July 31.

Nor did the legislature, in either their regular or special sessions, find time to address many other pressing concerns in Texas, like Medicaid expansion and police reforms that were proposed in the aftermath of former Houston resident George Floyd’s death.

“These cultural war issues get people to hunker down in the trenches that they’re used to being in around elections and refocus voters’ attention on how much they hate the other side,” Malitz said. “These issues are being deliberately used as a distraction from really widely felt stuff in Texas right now: Covid, economic recovery, the blackouts, baseline bad governance.”

Republicans are also trying to strip Texans of the only tool they have to demand good governance with a bill that would make the state’s already very restrictive voting laws even more so. It passed the state Senate on Thursday despite a more than 15-hour filibuster from an Austin Democrat, but still needs to pass the House and be signed by the governor.

As my colleague Ian Millhiser notes, the bill would strengthen constraints on absentee voting; ban drive-through polling sites; introduce new limitations and paperwork requirements on people who help disabled voters and non-English speakers cast a ballot; make it harder to remove partisan poll watchers who harass voters or otherwise disrupt an election; and impose harsh new penalties on people who commit even minor violations of Texas election law.

Steinhauser said that Texas Republicans are more unified behind that agenda than they have been in a long time.

“Part of that is probably the party being out of power nationally and having a common political enemy, if you will — to have the White House and Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to point to,” he said. “Also having Trump be a little less front and center in the party has allowed them to focus their critiques on national Democrats.”

But for Texas Democrats, there isn’t room for compromise on the Republican agenda. House Democrats had fled the state en masse last month in an effort to prevent votes on the voting bill in particular. But after Republican Speaker Dade Phelan signed civil arrest warrants for absent Democrats on Tuesday night with a green light from the Texas Supreme Court, nearly enough of them have returned to form a quorum, a two-thirds majority of the chamber required to conduct business, giving the Republican majority a chance to move forward with their agenda.

Though Republicans have decried Democrats’ actions as breaking relationships in a chamber that has historically sought to give the minority party a seat at the table, Republicans had already drawn battle lines with a legislative agenda designed to exploit partisan divisions.

Gov. Abbott has tried to pass off his failures on the Covid-19 resurgence on migrants

Beyond the problems with the legislature, Texas is in the middle of another statewide crisis: a third wave of Covid-19, this time brought on by the highly contagious delta variant. It has left hospitals with dwindling numbers of ICU beds and delaying non-emergency medical procedures while the governor calls in out-of-state medical staff to come to the rescue.

Nevertheless, Abbott hasn’t budged in refusing to use his gubernatorial powers to try to get rising case — and death — numbers under control. He could, for instance, implement statewide mask or vaccine mandates, but will not, saying that curbing the epidemic now comes down to “personal responsibility.”

He has instead actively worked against the interests of public health, issuing an executive order that prohibits any government entity from issuing its own mask mandates, effectively hamstringing local governments that are bearing the brunt of Covid-19 surge in keeping Texans safe. Several counties have gone ahead and implemented mask mandates anyway, but Abbott is going to court in an effort to reverse them.

Though he has praised the vaccine and has gotten the jab himself, Abbott is focused on protecting the rights of the unvaccinated.

Callaghan O’Hare/Bloomberg via Getty Images
A Coivd-19 test drive-thru testing site in Houston, Texas. Gov. Abbott issued an executive order prohibiting any government entity from issuing mask mandates.

“They have the individual right and responsibility to decide for themselves and their children whether they will wear masks, open their businesses and engage in leisure activities,” Abbott told the Dallas Morning News. “Vaccines, which remain in abundant supply, are the most effective defense against the virus, and they will always remain voluntary — never forced — in the State of Texas.”

Steinhauser said that Abbott is trying to balance the desire of millions of Texans not to return to the shutdowns of last year with the real immediate need to get millions more Texans vaccinated. Democrats, however, see it as an abdication of the governor’s responsibility to protect public health.

“This is beyond inaction — this is the governor tying the hands of health experts who are trying to keep Texans healthy as cases and hospitalizations increase,” Texas state Rep. Donna Howard, a former critical care nurse, said in a statement.

What’s more, Abbott has sought to blame the recent delta surge on migrants arriving on the southern border — playing into a false, nativist, and damaging right-wing narrative that might be particularly attractive to Republican voters in the state, who have long identified immigration and border security as top priorities in public opinion polling.

At a national level, a recent Axios poll found that nearly 37 percent of unvaccinated Americans blame “foreign travelers in the US” for the rise in Covid-19 cases. Abbott has played no small part in creating that perception.

They’re “allowing free pass into the United States of people with a high probability of Covid, and then spreading that Covid in our communities,” he said in an interview last month on Fox News.

But available data hasn’t shown migrants on the border to be any more likely to test positive for Covid-19. In March, the acting head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) told Congress that less than 6 percent of migrants at the border had tested positive for Covid-19, a lower percentage than the Texas positivity rate at that time.

Scapegoating migrants serves two purposes for Abbott: It obscures his role in failing to prevent the current Covid-19 surge and provides him with an excuse to pursue the kind of restrictive immigration policies that former President Donald Trump both popularized and made a priority.

Sergio Flores/AFP via Getty Images
Former President Trump is joined by Gov. Greg Abbott, during a visit to the border wall near Pharr, Texas, on June 30, 2021.

He recently issued an executive order allowing public safety officers to stop and reroute vehicles suspected of transporting migrants with Covid-19, though the measure has been blocked in federal court for now.

He has told Texas child care regulators to revoke the licenses of facilities that house migrant children and state troopers to jail migrants for state crimes, such as trespassing on private property when they cross the border.

And he is trying to finish the wall along the Texas border, putting forth a $250 million “down payment” drawn from state disaster relief funds — money that could have gone to the aid of those still recovering from last winter’s storms, or those struggling under the burden of the pandemic — and crowdfunding almost another $500,000 as of June 23. That’s still a drop in the bucket of what he might need to finish the project, which the federal government estimated could cost as much as $46 million per mile in some sectors of the border.

But it doesn’t really matter if Abbott finishes the wall or whether his executive order is ever allowed to go into effect. The policies have generated news cycles that boost his profile nationally, which will be important if he pursues a 2024 presidential bid as rumored.

“It’s a fantastic talking point for his primary electorate, both next year and in 2024,” Malitz said. “It’s government by theater. The things that they are doing with government in Texas are, by and large, for the purpose of introducing a message into the right wing media machine with obviously catastrophic humanitarian results.”

Abbott and his fellow Texas Republicans have been very successful at controlling messaging, and have had many wins in energizing state conservatives. Their party is poised to retain control of Texas. But these victories have come at a great cost, carried by the people of Texas.

(Facebook and Apple have been at odds since Apple introduced its anti-tracking feature to its mobile operating system, which Apple framed as a way to protect its users’ privacy from companies that track their activity across apps, particularly Facebook. So you can imagine that a Facebook executive was quite happy for a chance to weigh in on Apple’s own privacy issues.)

And Edward Snowden expressed his thoughts in meme form:

pic.twitter.com/yN9DcTsBNT

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) August 6, 2021

Some experts think Apple’s move could be a good one — or at least, not as bad as it’s been made to seem. Tech blogger John Gruber wondered if this could give Apple a way to fully encrypt iCloud backups from government surveillance while also being able to say it is monitoring its users’ content for CSAM.

“If these features work as described and only as described, there’s almost no cause for concern,” Gruber wrote, acknowledging that there are still “completely legitimate concerns from trustworthy experts about how the features could be abused or misused in the future.”

Ben Thompson of Stratechery pointed out that this could be Apple’s way of getting out ahead of potential laws in Europe requiring internet service providers to look for CSAM on their platforms. Stateside, American lawmakers have tried to pass their own legislation that would supposedly require internet services to monitor their platforms for CSAM or else lose their Section 230 protections. It’s not inconceivable that they’ll reintroduce that bill or something similar this Congress.

Or maybe Apple’s motives are simpler. Two years ago, the New York Times criticized Apple, along with several other tech companies, for not doing as much as they could to scan their services for CSAM and for implementing measures, such as encryption, that made such scans impossible and CSAM harder to detect. The internet was now “overrun” with CSAM, the Times said.

Apple’s attempt to re-explain its child protection measures

On Friday, Reuters reported that Apple’s internal Slack had hundreds of messages from Apple employees who were concerned that the CSAM scanner could be exploited by other governments as well as how its reputation for privacy was being damaged. A new PR push from Apple followed. Craig Federighi, Apple’s chief of software engineering, talked to the Wall Street Journal in a slickly produced video, and then Apple released a security threat model review of its child safety features that included some new details about the process and how Apple was ensuring it would only be used for its intended purpose.

So here we go: The databases will be provided by at least two separate, non-government child safety agencies to prevent governments from inserting images that are not CSAM but that they might want to scan their citizens’ phones for. Apple thinks that this, combined with its refusal to abide by any government’s demands that this system be used for anything except CSAM as well as the fact that matches will be reviewed by an Apple employee before being reported to anyone else, will be sufficient protection against users being scanned and punished for anything but CSAM.

Apple also wanted to make clear there will be a public list of the database hashes, or strings of numbers, that device owners can check to make sure those are the databases placed on their devices if they’re concerned a bad actor has planted a different database on their phone. That will let independent third parties audit the database hashes as well. As for the source of the databases, Apple says the database must be provided by two separate child safety organizations that are in two separate sovereign jurisdictions, and only the images that both agencies have will go into the database. This, it believes, will prevent one child safety organization from supplying non-CSAM images.

Apple has not yet said exactly when the CSAM feature will be released, so it’s not on your device yet. As for how many CSAM matches its technology will make before passing that along to a human reviewer (the “threshold”), the company is pretty sure that will be 30, but this number could still change.

This all seems reassuring, and Apple seems to have thought out the ways that on-device photo scans could be abused and ways to prevent them. It’s just too bad the company didn’t better anticipate how its initial announcement would be received.

But the one thing Apple still hasn’t addressed — probably because it can’t — is that a lot of people simply are not comfortable with the idea that a company can decide, one day, to just insert technology into their devices that scans data they consider to be private and sensitive. Yes, other services scan their users’ photos for CSAM, too, but doing it on the device is a line that a lot of customers didn’t want or expect Apple to cross. After all, Apple spent years convincing them that it never would.

Update, August 13, 4:55 pm: Updated to include new information about Apple’s messaging around its CSAM scanning technology.

It’s not COVID-19 in kids. It’s RSV. pic.twitter.com/huZBgY1LCO

— Daniel Uhlfelder (@DWUhlfelderLaw) August 11, 2021

DeSantis’s remarks are at odds with data from his own state Department of Health showing that RSV cases have decreased in recent weeks and can currently be counted on one hand. By contrast, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported earlier this month that Florida had more than 30 Covid-stricken kids in the hospital each day between July 24 and 30.

That press conference came one day after DeSantis expressed confusion about officials from his own state requesting ventilators and smaller breathing devices from the federal government — equipment needed to prevent the state’s hospitals from becoming overwhelmed.

ℹ Florida COVID-19 Update for August 10, 2021

Total Confirmed Hospitalizations: 14,787 pic.twitter.com/T3thlJwHyL

— Florida Hospital Association (@FLHospitalAssn) August 10, 2021

DeSantis — who last week admonished President Joe Biden, “why don’t you get this border secure and until you do that, I don’t want to hear a blip about Covid from you” — made comments on Tuesday to reporters seeming to indicate that he’s either oblivious to the ventilator request or trying to intentionally mislead people about it.

“I would honestly doubt that that’s true, but I’ll look because we have a lot of stuff that we stockpiled over the last year and a half through the Department of Emergency Management,” DeSantis said. “I’ve not had any requests across my desk. I have not been notified of that.”

A short time after, NBC reported not only that the request had been made, but that the federal government had already sent the breathing gear to Florida.

In a written response to an email sent by Vox, Weesam Khoury, communications director for the Florida Department of Health (DOH), claimed, “to be clear, there is not a shortage of ventilators in Florida,” adding that the request is “a proactive measure to ensure there are consistent resources available in the state stockpile for deployment” made by “health care facilities.”

“These waves are something you just have to deal with”

DeSantis, a former Congress member who distinguished himself during his 2018 gubernatorial run with his sycophantic praise of Trump, became something of a national conservative hero last year due to his hands-off approach. As my colleague German Lopez explained last year:

Florida was relatively late in closing down statewide, but it was also among the first to reopen. The state also reopened very quickly — letting restaurants, bars, and other businesses reopen, sometimes at high or full capacity, within weeks of ending its lockdown. That fast pace of reopening not only made it easier for people to infect each other with the coronavirus, but also made it much harder to evaluate, due to lags in coronavirus case reporting, if each phase of reopening was leading to uncontrollable growth in infections.

Relatively speaking, the Covid situation in Florida was far from a disaster until quite recently, and DeSantis has touted his ability to keep the state’s unemployment rate low throughout the pandemic. The state is still in the middle of the pack overall in terms of Covid deaths per 100,000 residents. But sadly, there’s no guarantee that will remain the case, as in recent weeks Florida has accounted for the second-highest number of Covid cases per capita in the US, and the highest number of deaths (141 per day).

Dr.  Jonathan Reiner of the George Washington University School of Medicine said during a recent CNN appearance that if Florida were a foreign country, the federal government would consider banning travel to it.

“The viral load in Florida is so high right now, there are really only two places on the planet where it’s higher,” Reiner said. (Those two places: Botswana and Louisiana.)

In a Talking Points Memo piece arguing that DeSantis “is the nation’s worst Covid governor,” Josh Kovensky details how DeSantis enabled the ongoing Covid surge with his two-front war on mask mandates and vaccine mandates:

As all of this preventable carnage began, DeSantis shrugged it off with a series of orders that, epidemiologists say, poured gasoline on the already more contagious Delta variant. He has made national news this year by banning two mandates that public health officials have said are needed to keep hospitalizations down: vaccine and indoor mask requirements. The Florida government has prohibited businesses and government agencies from requiring vaccines, and has forbid schools from instituting mask requirements.

Notably, DeSantis’s vaccine mandate prohibition includes cruise ships — a policy MSNBC’s Chris Hayes has characterized as the “single most deranged Covid policy we’ve seen.” But a federal judge earlier this week ruled that Florida can’t bar cruise companies from requiring proof of vaccination.

Likewise, DeSantis’s mask mandates ban is being challenged in court by parents and ignored by at least one school board. DeSantis has responded by saying the Florida Board of Education might withhold paychecks from board members and administrators who enforce mask mandates, which in turn has prompted the White House to suggest it might try to step in. (On Thursday, the DeSantis administration backed down from its threat to withhold pay.)

Biden indirectly took aim at DeSantis during a speech earlier this month, saying, “Just two states, Florida and Texas, account for one-third of all new Covid-19 cases in the entire country. We need leadership from everyone … I say to these governors, please help, but if you aren’t going to help, at least get out of the way.”

“Just two states, Florida and Texas, account for one-third of all new Covid-19 cases in the entire country. We need leadership from everyone … I say to these governors, please help, but if you aren’t going to help, at least get out of the way” – Biden pic.twitter.com/dPDnGAJ38u

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 3, 2021

On Thursday, news broke that just days into Florida’s school year, 440 students in Palm Beach County have already been asked to quarantine because of Covid-19 exposure. And Friday morning brought reports of four Broward County teachers dying of Covid in a single day.

But DeSantis seems undeterred.

“It’s airborne. It’s aerosolized,” he said of the delta variant on Thursday. “So we just have to understand when that’s happening these waves are something you just have to deal with.”

DeSantis Press Secretary Christina Pushaw dismissed research linking mask mandates to reduced Covid-19 spread in an email to Vox, writing, “Governor DeSantis will continue to protect individual rights from unscientific mandates promoted by overreaching politicians who are desperate to give the appearance of ‘doing something’ even if it has no effect.”

DeSantis doesn’t seem big on self-reflection

What explains DeSantis’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge the gravity of the Florida Covid case spike and stop working against public health best practices? The answer to that question is up for debate, but one factor may be a belief that reversing course would undermine his brand as the governor who stuck it to the libs by thumbing his nose at the Dr.  Faucis of the world. That brand has established DeSantis as the non-Trump frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

After all, it was just last month that DeSantis was selling “Don’t Fauci My Florida” merchandise on his website.

As Fauci has conducted local and national interviews obliquely criticizing DeSantis’s policies, DeSantis has continued to downplay the surge, saying last week that “this is our COVID season.” Meanwhile, hospitals in the state are reporting “unprecedented” wait times for beds.

Press Secretary Pushaw pointed to the fact that Covid-19 hospitalizations dipped this week in the Jacksonville area, writing to Vox, “COVID cases in the areas of the state that were earliest hit in this wave, such as Jacksonville, have already started their decline as predicted — without any government authority imposing non-pharmaceutical interventions.”

“Governor DeSantis continues to support vaccination for Covid-19 as well as promoting monoclonal antibody treatment for anyone who tests positive and is at risk of severe illness from Covid-19,” she continued.

It’s possible that as the news grows more dire, Floridians will adjust their behavior and/or get vaccinated if they haven’t already, prompting new cases to begin trending down again. But even in that scenario, the fact remains that by stubbornly working at cross- purposes with public health experts, DeSantis has made Florida’s Covid-19 problem worse than it had to be.

Update, August 13, 4:40 pm: Updated to include comment from DeSantis’s office and the Florida Department of Health.

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