Texas Wants A Hot War With Joe Biden, And Republican Governors Want To Help!
WAR BONER!
On Monday the Supreme Court ruled that the Border Patrol can remove the razor wire that Texas has been using to turn its border into Governor Greg Abbott’s Happytime Deathland for Migrants amusement park. Abbott has stayed defiant, telling anyone who would listen that the Texas National Guard was going to keep putting up his Homicide HelperTM murder wire no matter what them dadgum liberals in Washington say.
MONDAY!
So the National Guard is apparently still putting up new razor wire in one spot as fast as the Border Patrol can remove it from another. Which, as Natalie Musumeci at Business Insider points out, is not technically defying the Supreme Court:
The ruling does not call for Texas to take any action in the matter — and the state's Republican governor, Greg Abbott, suggested in a post to X on Wednesday that Texas will keep putting up the fencing, even if federal border agents take it down.
See, the order does not specifically say Texas cannot put up more razor wire, just that the Border Patrol has the right to cut it all down. Our guess is that the Supreme Court figured their order implied that Abbott should cut the shit and they will have to clarify the order as soon as the Department of Justice can file another lawsuit.
But Abbott’s defiance has induced an epidemic of WAR BONERS amongst the nation’s Republican governors, who have taken to the airwaves and the social medias to let the world know that they too stand with Abbott against the “invasion” of Texas, no matter what the Constitution they allegedly revere says about who is in charge of policing the nation’s borders. (Hint: It’s not the nation’s governors.)
What would America be without the occasional nullification crisis to keep us on our toes?
Thus you have sights such as an anchor on Newsmax struggling to not ejaculate all over the camera lens as he asks Oklahoma’s cement-headed governor Kevin Stitt if President Joe Biden will federalize the Texas National Guard, and if he does, how many fine Texans will say “screw you, Biden” and refuse to comply, maybe putting us “on course for a force-on-force conflict.”
Stitt responded that it would certainly put the National Guardsmen and –women in the awkward position of either following federal orders or protecting their “homeland,” ignoring the fact that it is not just Texas but all of America that is their homeland and has been since 1845, with just one short interruption from 1861 to 1865 that bloodily underscored the point.
Stitt continued:
“Then you’ve got Oklahoma and Florida and Tennessee and you got all these other states that would send our National Guard to help and support the efforts of Governor Abbott. Because every state is a border state. You talked about fentanyl. The deaths in Oklahoma since I’ve taken office are up 500 percent, and we know that’s coming across the southern border.”
Wow, that seems like a terrible problem that has escalated on Stitt’s watch. Maybe he should work on flooding his state with resources to counter the fentanyl problem instead of spending his time ordering PBS to stop making children gay.
Not wanting to be left out of the public chest-thumping, South Dakota’s Kristi Noem told Fox News that if Abbott needed more razor wire, she would “load it into a pickup myself” and drive it down to Texas. Then she announced she would be going to Texas herself this weekend, presumably so she can squint at the Rio Grande like Mike Pence squinting at North Korea.
PREVIOUSLY! A BAD ONE!
Yr Wonkette offers our deepest congratulations to the citizens of South Dakota for getting their attention whore of a governor out of the state for a weekend.
Noem and Stitt were two of 25 Republican governors who released a statement on Thursday offering their support to Abbott while claiming constitutional authority to step up and “protect the sovereignty of our states,” claiming that Article 1, Section 10, Clause 3 of the Constitution gives them the authority to do so in the face of President Biden’s alleged failure to stop the “invasion.” This claim requires a very tortured interpretation of Section 10, which reads:
No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.
The word “invaded” would imply a military force swarming unimpeded across the border, which is not what’s happening. What is happening is that unarmed migrants are crossing the border, being picked up by Border Patrol, and requesting asylum. Under international law, the US has to consider all these claims. It cannot just load the migrants into a giant catapult and fire them back across the Rio Grande.
THIS GUY.
But by redefining the migrant crisis as an “invastion,” Abbott and his fellow xenophobes pretend they can invoke the Constitution to carry out some masturbatory recreation of the Battle of San Jacinto.
This is, legally speaking, bullshit, as immigration lawyer Aaron Reichlin-Melnick explained in a Twitter thread:
Article 1, Section 10 of the Constitution does not give Texas a right to carry out immigration law. Here’s what it says. Texas is not being “actually invaded” and laying razor wire is not “engaging in war” – which anyone with two brain cells can see.
Abbott's theatrical claim to a right to "wage war" by putting up razor wire and prosecuting migrants for misdemeanor trespassing is ridiculous—and a loser in the courts. Multiple states tried to invoke this clause in the 1990s and got laughed out of court.
When Texas tried to make the Invasion Clause argument last year in the lawsuit over the buoys, a federal judge called the idea “breathtaking” (a polite way of saying BS) and noted in a footnote that this would give a governor more power than the President.
Reichlin-Melnick also suggests someone tell Abbott if he’s waging war, he should probably treat the migrants he’s picking up as full-blown prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention. This would presumably mean he’s not allowed to put migrants on buses and dump them in cold-weather cities in the dead of winter without proper clothing, as Illinois’ governor had to recently beg him not to do as a massive blizzard was bearing down on his state.
HIM AGAIN.
For all the threats of sending other states’ National Guard units to help Texas and all the high-minded invocations of James Madison and the Federalist Papers, it should be noted that at the moment, this conflict is still a legal one. There are no imminent showdowns over Biden federalizing the National Guard or sending in the 82nd Airborne, motivating Abbott to metaphorically stand in the schoolhouse door to keep his precious child-maiming wire in place.
Of course, the Republican governors could go yell at the GOP members of Congress who are busy killing a fairly conservative immigration bill simply because Donald Trump told them to, but that would imply they are actually interested in solving the border’s problems and not just trying to keep it as an election-year issue they can beat Democrats over the head with, which HA HA HA MANIACAL LAUGHTER.
Lawyers, Guns, and Money also covered this story, and they have a regular over there, named Karen, Cassandra of Texas, that had a very good bit of insight about the current shit Gov. Abbott is pulling.
Basically she is pointing out that even by conservative standards, Abbott has been a massive failure of a governor. He's tried and failed multiple times to destroy public education in Texas, being rebuffed by his own party. He's funding primary campaigns against GOP reps in the state lege who vote against him. And then there's all the shit with Ken Paxton and all his cartoon villain corruption.
The Texas GOP is on the brink of collapsing, and Greg Abbott knows this. So he's trying to unify his party by picking a fight against Joe Biden himself, because if it's one thing they can all agree on it's that Joe Biden sucks. The problem here is that Joe is not taking the obvious bait.
As a Texan myself, I agree with this assessment. They absolutely know they are fucked, and fucked hard, and the only possible solution they can use to climb out of the grave they dug for themselves is to perform a series of dangerous, escalating stunts to attempt an over-reaction for Joe Biden. That being said, this is going to get messy, but I also seriously doubt that the situation will escalate to the point where Texas forces are exchanging gunfire with the US Army.
Hold the line, folks.
OT: I.e., he's lying.
𝗧𝗲𝘅𝗮𝘀 𝗚𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗼𝗿 𝗚𝗿𝗲𝗴 𝗔𝗯𝗯𝗼𝘁𝘁 𝗶𝗻 𝗜𝗡𝗗𝗜𝗔 𝗝𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗢𝗻𝗲 𝗗𝗮𝘆 𝗔𝗳𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗗𝗲𝗰𝗹𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗛𝗶𝘀 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗪𝗮𝘀 𝗨𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿 ‘𝗜𝗻𝘃𝗮𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻’
https://www.mediaite.com/politics/texas-governor-greg-abbott-enjoys-great-day-in-india-just-one-day-after-declaring-his-state-was-under-invasion/