The Texas blizzard nightmare is Republican governance in a nutshell
Ryan Cooper
The United States is still in the middle of a murderous pandemic, and Texas has been suffering its worst power blackout in at least a decade, during a brutally cold winter storm. Lights were finally coming back on for many on Thursday, but still hundreds of thousands of people were without power or water — some since Sunday night. At least 21 people have died.
So Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) knew what to do: quietly nip down to Cancun for a bit of rest and relaxation. Numerous people on the plane recognized him, and the story was later confirmed by Fox News and NBC. It sparked an immediate political firestorm, and Cruz slunk back on Thursday. In a statement, he claimed he was simply following a request from his daughter — but he reportedly moved up his return date from Saturday only after the story spread.
It was all darkly amusing. But what Cruz did is emblematic of the Republican Party's mode of governance. The reason Cruz felt comfortable leaving Texans to freeze solid on the sidewalks of Houston is the same reason the Texas power grid crumpled under the winter storm. Theirs is a party in which catering to the welfare of one's constituents, or indeed any kind of substantive political agenda, has been supplanted by propaganda, culture war grievance, and media theatrics. Neither he nor anybody else in a leadership position in the party knows or cares about how to build a reliable power grid. They just want to get rich owning the libs.
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https://theweek.com/articles/967583/texas-blizzard-nightmare-republican-governance-nutshell
