HOUSTON — IF I’ve learned anything living in Texas, lo, these many years, it is that actions that seem nuts or cruel on the surface usually have some rational basis down below. But I’m struggling to see this one.
Last month, our governor, Greg Abbott, announced that he was joining several other governors in refusing to allow refugees from war-torn Syria to enter Texas. Mr. Abbott wrote the president that the administration’s policy of accepting a measly 10,000 desperate people “irresponsibly exposes our fellow Americans to unacceptable peril.”
Whether or not Mr. Abbott has the legal right to deny federal authority, he wagged his finger at the leader of the free world and said, “No, sir.” And now the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, with the governor’s backing, is suing the United States, various federal agencies and a refugee resettlement nonprofit to keep a Syrian family of six from moving to the Dallas area — again, citing safety concerns.
Having observed Mr. Abbott for nearly a year as governor (and for 12 years before that as state attorney general, an elective office here), I’m still pondering his psychological and legal moves. I can’t make up my mind, for example, whether he is as cynical as our former panderer in chief, Gov. Rick Perry, or whether he’s more like Senator Ted Cruz, who is, for better or worse, a true believer in … something.
As a child, Mr. Abbott was schooled in small-town Texas values: independence, hard work and deep faith. He wasn’t cosmopolitan but he wasn’t a dummy either: The young Abbott excelled in school, got a law degree from Vanderbilt and did a stint on the Texas Supreme Court before becoming the state’s attorney general.
It’s part of the Abbott legend that such experiences helped him triumph over tragedy: His father died when he was in high school and then, when Mr. Abbott was 26, he was hit by a falling tree that crushed his spine and left him partially paralyzed; he uses a wheelchair.
Of course, no one could fault Mr. Abbott for accepting a settlement of more than $10 million from the homeowner of the property where he received his injury. Yet it seemed kind of churlish that he went on to work tirelessly against so-called frivolous lawsuits, and the tort reform he championed capped awards for people injured by medical malpractice at $250,000.
Most important, Mr. Abbott was elected to the Texas Supreme Court in 1995, and from then on has shown an impeccable understanding of his electorate. No one wins statewide office here without first running the Republican primary gantlet — and that means winning over a crowd so far to the right that, if he were alive and living in Texas today, Ronald Reagan couldn’t get elected.
Mr. Abbott’s description of his job as attorney general — “I go into the office, I sue the federal government and I go home” — resonated magnificently with this bunch. His targets included the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and the Affordable Care Act. In other words, Mr. Abbott’s anti-government animus has probably done more to please campaign contributors like the Koch brothers than serve the interests of low-income Texans without access to decent health care.
There was also the Jade Helm 15 pseudo-crisis last July, when Mr. Abbott called out the Texas State Guard to monitor a United States military training exercise. The governor claimed he acted in order to calm the fears of Texans who were worried about being victims of an invasion by American government forces. Self-defense is, after all, a local obsession.
You might think — wrongly, of course — that a few traumatized refugees would pose less of a threat than a lot of Texans wandering around with weapons on their hips. Except on college campuses, that is, where only concealed guns are allowed.
It was Mr. Abbott who signed the open carry and campus carry bills into law, at — where else? — a shooting range in the Austin suburb of Pflugerville. He wanted, he said, to ensure that Texans’ Second Amendment rights were secure.
Another of Mr. Abbott’s triumphs was winning, in 2005, a United States Supreme Court battle to keep a monument of the Ten Commandments on display in front of the state capitol. But his Christian convictions go only so far: On the refugee issue, he’s refused to be as neighborly as Mr. Cruz, who hedged his electoral bets by declaring that Texas was probably safe from attack as long as it accepted only Christian Syrians. (Mr. Cruz is a child of immigrants, which may explain his lapse into empathy.)
Maybe it’s best to think of Mr. Abbott as selectively generous. As the refugee debate roiled last month, he tweeted a quotation from the Book of Jeremiah: “ ‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the LORD, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’ ”
For Syrian refugees, apparently, he has other plans.
Mimi Swartz is an executive editor at Texas Monthly and a contributing opinion writer.
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