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greg abbott
Texas Gov. Spent $221 Million on Migrant Busing 'Political Stunt'
"Our schools are starved for resources with a $32.7 billion surplus, yet Gov. Abbott has no problem spending $1,841 per person for a political stunt," said one Texan.
Sep 05, 2024
Since April 2022, Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has spent over $221 million in taxpayer money transporting nearly 120,000 migrants to six Democrat-led cities outside of the state, the Washington Examinerrevealed Thursday.
"That's roughly $1,841 per person," noted Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council who has previously criticized Abbott's "dehumanizing" bus scheme and other elements of the governor's Operation Lone Star.
"By comparison, a bus ticket to New York costs about $215, while a flight costs about $350," he highlighted. "It would have WAY cheaper to just give migrants money for tickets. Abbott's effort not only made it a political stunt, it lined a contractor's pocket."
As the conservative Examiner reported:
A public information request filed to the Texas Division of Emergency Management showed that the state made more than 750 payments totaling $221,705,637 to transportation companies since the start of operations in April 2022 and August 2024.
Nearly all of the costs were picked up by the state's 30 million residents, with a small portion, $460,196, donated from outside parties. Less than 1% of the $221 million was picked up by nontaxpayers.
The Examiner noted that the almost 120,000 migrants bused north are a "small number" of the more than 5.3 million people who crossed the southern border illegally but have been allowed to remain in the United States since January 2021, according to a U.S. House Judiciary Committee draft report the outlet exclusively obtained earlier this year.
While the busing reportedly stopped earlier this summer due to lack of demand, Abbott's office said last month that since 2022, his taxpayer-funded scheme had transported over 45,900 migrants to New York City, 36,900 to Chicago, 19,200 to Denver, 12,500 to Washington, D.C., 3,400 to Philadelphia, and 1,500 to Los Angeles.
"The overwhelming majority of migrants didn't want to stay in Texas. They wanted to go elsewhere. So if the question was the most efficient way to help them leave the state, the answer would be just buy them tickets and not pay millions to bus them to NYC," Reichlin-Melnick said Thursday. "They are able to live wherever they want while they go through the court process. It's just that many people used up every last cent to get here, so a free bus from Abbott was a very enticing option."
"I've been on record saying that most migrants were extremely happy with the free buses. Despite a lot of lies out there about migrants being bought tickets, the reality is that nearly all migrants have to purchase transportation away from the border, making free buses a godsend," he added. "The problem with the buses has always been that they weaponized migrants by going to only a small handful of politically charged locations (regardless of where migrants wanted to go), and that they were a big waste of money given the cheaper option of donating bus/plane tickets."
In addition to the busing stunt, Abbott has come under fire in recent years for installing razor wire and buoys—which critics called "death traps"—in the Rio Grande as well as signing a pair of anti-migrant bills that Krish O'Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, described as "deeply harmful and unconstitutional."
According to a New York Times investigation published in July, over half of the migrants bused out Texas were initially from Venezuela—a South American nation enduring not only ongoing political turmoil but also U.S. economic sanctions that, as hundreds of legal experts and groups wrote last month, "extensively harm civilian populations" and "often drive mass migration."
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Texas GOP Invents Corporate Courts Ready to Do Industry's Bidding
"Why bother judge-shopping when you can just invent a new court?" asked one watchdog.
Sep 04, 2024
In recent months, corporate groups such as the powerful U.S. Chamber of Commerce have faced growing backlash over "judge-shopping," a tactic whereby plaintiffs deliberately select legal venues they believe will produce favorable outcomes.
But as of the beginning of this month, corporations have access to nearly a dozen Texas courts created specifically for the purpose of settling major business cases as well as a statewide panel that will hear appeals from the newly established courts.
"Why bother judge-shopping when you can just invent a new court?" Adrian Shelley, Texas director of Public Citizen, asked in a statement Tuesday.
Texas' Business Court Judicial District, which consists of 11 business courts, is a product of Republican legislation backed by GOP Gov. Greg Abbott, a Big Oil ally tasked with handpicking the courts' judges. A local Chamber of Commerce branch characterized the new courts as "a collaborative effort between the state legislature and the business community."
The state's oil and gas industry lobbied aggressively for the new business district, and their investment appears to have paid off. As journalist Katya Schwenk reported for The Lever last week, "at least five of Abbott's 13 appointees to the business courts, including all three appointees to the appellate court, have worked on behalf of fossil fuel companies."
While it's not the only U.S. state with courts specifically dedicated to corporate cases, Schwenk explained that "Texas' model is different from many other states' business courts."
"The judges are appointed personally by the governor, with virtually no oversight from the legislative branch," Schwenk wrote. "And they only serve two-year terms—in contrast to 12-year terms in Delaware and six-year terms in Nevada—in theory making it easy for Abbott or a successor to quickly replace a judge who doesn't rule in favor of his political interests. Abbott has been pushing for Texas to create such a system for years."
"In the words of one local corporate law firm, the courts were designed to 'preserve Texas' business-friendly culture,' and major corporate actors seem to agree," Schwenk continued. "In the wake of the courts' rollout, SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk announced he was reincorporating the rocket company in Texas; he has since said he is moving SpaceX's headquarters there from California, as well as those of X, formerly Twitter."
"Voters have already chosen the judges they want to head the courts in their communities; Greg Abbott is rejecting that choice by creating new courts that launch with unelected judges he picked."
The new business courts will hear cases involving disputes worth over $10 million, and the 15th Court of Appeals will hear appeals arising from those cases.
As Public Health Watchrecently observed, the creation of the new appeals panel "allows industries and state regulators to bypass the 3rd Court of Appeals, whose six justices are, at the moment, all Democrats." The judges on that court are also elected, unlike the inaugural members of the newly established 15th Court of Appeals.
Shelley of Public Citizen said Wednesday that "there is an ongoing campaign to rip power away from institutions considered unfriendly to the agenda of the state's Republican majority."
"In addition to creating these courts, the legislature also passed H.B. 2627, the Death Star bill, that blocked cities and counties from creating local rules that are best for those communities, including on issues that concern public health, safety, and the environment," said Shelley. "Just as state lawmakers view democratically elected city councils as standing in their way, especially in blue-leaning cities, they don't want the courts checking their power."
"Voters have already chosen the judges they want to head the courts in their communities; Greg Abbott is rejecting that choice by creating new courts that launch with unelected judges he picked," he continued. "These maneuvers are not only a threat to public health and the environment but also undemocratic."
Public Health Watch reported in July that a number of significant climate-related cases are set to move from the 3rd Court of Appeals—which the outlet characterized as generally "receptive to environmentalists' arguments"—to the 15th Court, including "proposed expansions of the ExxonMobil chemical plant in Baytown, near Houston, which experienced a major accident in 2019, and the Valero refinery in Corpus Christi."
Scott Brister, the judge Abbott chose to serve as chief justice of the 15th Court of Appeals, "worked at a law firm known for its specialty in fossil fuel litigation," Schwenk reported last week.
"While an attorney there, Brister, a Republican, led the defense of the oil company BP in litigation over the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill, one of the worst environmental disasters in history, which released more than 100 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010," Schwenk noted. "Before then, while serving on the Texas Supreme Court, Brister threw out a major guilty verdict against oil giant ExxonMobil for allegedly poisoning a town's water supply."
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Beware the Republican Plot to Steal the 2024 Election
From Georgia to Arizona, Nevada to Michigan, Republicans are mounting an all-out assault on the election process that journalist Ari Berman refers to as a “five-alarm fire for democracy.”
Aug 31, 2024
The “Party of Lincoln,” as Republicans call themselves, seems intent on undermining just about everything President Abraham Lincoln lived and died for. This includes Republican efforts to upend the way elections are run, by restricting who gets to vote, how voting is conducted, and how votes are counted and certified.
The outcome of the tight presidential race between former U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris will hinge on the votes in a handful of swing states. From Georgia to Arizona, Nevada to Michigan, Republicans are mounting an all-out assault on the election process that journalist Ari Berman refers to as a “five-alarm fire for democracy.”
“It appears that Georgia Republicans are laying the groundwork not to certify the presidential election if Kamala Harris wins,” Berman said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “They’re doing exactly what Trump wanted them to do in 2020. Trump made Georgia the epicenter of the attempt to try to overturn the election. He asked local and State Board of Elections and election officials not to certify the election. They refused to do so; they followed the law. It seems like in 2024 they’re going to extraordinary lengths to try to implement the measures that failed in 2020, to try to rig the election for Trump.”
The Republican Party of today, desperate to suppress the votes of people of color, could not be further from the Party of Lincoln.
Georgia Republicans altered how counties count and certify votes. The Democratic Party of Georgia, the Democratic National Committee, and 10 Democratic county election officials from across Georgia have sued, seeking to roll back the changes. Their lawsuit argues, “Georgia’s State Election Board has passed a host of last-minute rules that threaten to sow chaos and impede the vote-canvassing process.”
Berman warns: “These state and local election boards have been taken over, in some cases, by election deniers, by MAGA extremists…The administration of elections matters so much because you can cast a vote, you can have your vote counted, but it doesn’t actually matter until votes are certified.”
In Texas, the Republican-controlled state government has for years tried to restrict voting in districts where Democratic candidates do well. Donald Trump won Texas by over five percentage points in 2020, but President Joe Biden won the cities of Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Austin, and El Paso as well as the Rio Grande Valley.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced this week that he has purged over 1 million voters from Texas voter rolls. This increasingly common tactic inevitably removes legally-registered voters, often through faulty data screens that target likely Democratic voters.
Meanwhile, Texas’ Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, who’s currently agreed to do community service to avoid a felony criminal securities fraud trial, and survived an unrelated impeachment trial in the Republican-controlled state senate, has been raiding nonprofit organizations that provide services to immigrant and Latino communities.
Last week, under Paxton’s orders, the homes of a dozen members of LULAC, the League of United Latin American Citizens, were raided and searched by Texas authorities, including SWAT teams. One activist’s door was broken down. Texas House candidate Cecilia Castellano, running for an open seat to represent Uvalde, the town devastated by one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history, had her home raided. Government agents took her cell phone and, weeks ahead of election day, threw her campaign into chaos.
LULAC said in a statement, “Attorney General Paxton’s actions clearly aim to suppress the Latino vote through intimidation and any means necessary to tilt the electoral process in favor of his political allies.” LULAC has called on the Justice Department to investigate Paxton over the raids.
Juan Proaño, CEO of LULAC, said on Democracy Now!, “In the last U.S. Census, they reported 12.1 million Latinos in the state of Texas. For the first time, Latinos actually outnumber non-Hispanic whites, which is at 12 million. When you take into account not just the Latino population in the state of Texas, but the African American and Asian population… the minority community in Texas now stands at over 60%. Texas is and has been a majority-minority state. So, we see these, effectively, as tactics for the Republicans to actually stay in control of the government in Texas.”
If further evidence of Republican attempts to subvert the will of the voters were needed, Pluribus News, a nonprofit news organization, reports that Republican-controlled state governments are altering language on progressive state ballot initiatives to confuse or mislead voters. Arizona, for example, inserted “unborn human being” in place of fetus or embryo in the ballot initiative intended to guarantee the right to an abortion. Voters in Florida and Ohio will face similar confusing language in their ballot initiatives.
In President Lincoln’s final public address, three days before his assassination, Lincoln advocated that the right to vote be granted to formerly enslaved Black men (as only men could legally vote, until 1920). The Republican Party of today, desperate to suppress the votes of people of color, could not be further from the Party of Lincoln.
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