Texas. Big, bold, brash. Because of their choices, they had a life-costing week of bitter cold that subjected them to no power, no heat, no clean water, bursting pipes and no water pressure (think--fire). Their governor, Republican Greg Abbott, fallaciously said it was the fault of the non-existent "deadly Green Deal."
These unusual weather patterns come through Texas about once a decade (last one was in 2011) so it was not unheard of nor never before experienced. Texans installed leadership and voted for an independent power grid so that they could dispense with federal oversight and build a semi-private system as cheaply as possible, eschewing normal built-in safeguards like insulation. Damn Feds! Well, okay, their systems froze solid and everything went down. The expected resulting damage will cost $17-20B or more.
Federal and outside and local help is on the way! FEMA is rushing generators, water and blankets to the state. New York City Congresswoman AOC raised $1M to be used in disaster relief. Local politicians and prominent persons such as Beto O'Rourke manned phone banks, distributed supplies and personally fixed things like malfunctioning generators at water plants.
Texas Republican Senator Senator Ted Cruz is a traitor who helped orchestrate the violent, deadly insurrection at the Capitol last month by sponsoring other Republican traitors in the House in contesting the validation of certification of the electoral college presidential election in which President Biden was elected overwhelmingly last November to the presidency by over seven million votes. Biden effected a landslide which Cruz knowingly denied and tried to overthrow. He also voted against providing federal disaster relief to the Northeast following Superstorm Sandy less than a decade ago. Also, as soon as his house in Houston got cold, knowing he had already received two coronavirus shots and was thereby personally impervious to the deadly pandemic unlike the vat majority of his constituents and most Americans, he decamped ASAP to CanCun in Mexico to ride out the week in a warm luxury hotel there. When he was caught on camera and publicly shamed (hard to do with this compassionless--sound familiar?--dissembling or worse phony populist and self-proclaimed con-law expert) he blamed his two minor daughters for his elite, craven conduct and returned to where he had abandoned his at-peril constituents who could have used his advocacy at the national level to secure quicker and more state relief.
El Paso did not suffer the deadly travails of of the rest of Texas, because that city undertook hardening of its power-grid during the intervening decade after the debilitating 2011 storm. They set an example that could have greatly ameliorated the current situation in the rest of the state which ignored warnings, disdained federal regulations and actively went its own way to "prove" Texians' ruggedness and ballyhooed independence.
Disaster relief during the pendency of the duress is appropriate. Federal relief thereafter to clean up and pay for the long-lasting damages, outside of longstanding paid-for applicable insurance coverage, is inappropriate given the choices Texans made to leave the national power grids in order to escape federal safety regulations and go on the cheap, which we should not pay for.
They should pay for the damage cost by their shortsightedness themselves, billions at the back end and people in misery and dying so they could save millions at the front end. Their duty going forward is to acknowledge climate change and pay for the adequate protection of their assets, and their remedy for their current dire situation is to replace the statewide leadership, all Republicans, which left them so tragically
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