Texas Republicans lead the charge on Biden
WASHINGTON — It took President Joe Biden all of six weeks to spark a slew of fights with Texas Republicans over oil, immigration, guns and more.
Even as the president touts major early victories — including accelerating COVID vaccinations and a $1.9 trillion stimulus — new battles are brewing on several fronts as Biden took executive action or threw his support behind legislation aimed at expanding voting rights, bolstering unions and restricting gun purchases.
Meanwhile, Texas Republicans including Gov. Greg Abbott are blaming Biden for a migration surge at the border, saying it is fueled by the president’s new approach to immigration.
“It sure feels like President Biden is targeting Texas,” said U.S. Rep. Kevin Brady, a Republican from The Woodlands who pointed to Biden’s moves to end the Keystone XL pipeline and pause drilling on federal lands.
“Biden is out of control,” Attorney General Ken Paxton recently tweeted as he railed against a Biden order on voting access. On Wednesday, he joined 20 other Republican attorneys general in suing over Biden’s Keystone XL pipeline order.
Paxton has already stopped one White House policy with a lawsuit filed two days after Biden’s inauguration. The state sued over Biden’s order halting certain deportations for 100 days, which a judge blocked in an early victory for the state. But Paxton has threatened to challenge other Biden priorities, including a Democratic bill that would essentially establish a national election code.
Nothing new
Turning up the heat on a Democratic president early isn’t a new playbook for Republicans — and it’s one that previously has worked well for the party. The GOP openly obstructed many of the priorities of former President Barrack Obama, starting in 2009 as he took office.
Then they took the House in the midterms the next year.
Democrats took the same approach with President Donald Trump in 2017 and saw the same results in 2018.
“Keeping this in the forefront with the base supporters is a good strategy — ‘look at what the president’s doing,’ making Biden the bad guy and bringing up how everything he is doing is so counter to Texas values,” said Renée Cross, senior director at the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs. “That’s going to play extremely well with the Republican base.”
Cross said it’s especially important for Republicans as Biden has racked up some big victories early in his term. The president this week declared all Americans will be eligible for COVID vaccines by May and signed the stimulus package set to boost incomes of many Texans, which polling shows is widely supported, even by many GOP voters.
“You don’t want your opposition to seem to be winning at everything,” Cross said.
Republicans say the stimulus, which Democrats passed without a single GOP vote, is a sign of how little Biden and his allies in Congress care about working across the aisle.
“I know the national narrative for Americans is that we’re all taller, smarter and better looking since Joe Biden became president, but the truth is, this is the most partisan White House that I’ve seen,” Brady said. “I don’t know why they went their own way, but I don’t think it’s going to get any better.”
Texas Democrats, meanwhile, have united behind most of Biden’s priorities, even as some moderates in the Texas delegation have balked at his moves on oil and immigration. His Texas allies are working to frame Biden’s early days as focused on fighting for the working class, pointing to aid for the 3.9 million Texans living in poverty included in the stimulus.
“This administration did not give up, did not give in,” U.S. Rep. Al Green of Houston said as he voted for the stimulus this week. “This administration has become now a symbol of hope and help for working class people.”
Trouble on the border
The border has been at the center of Texas Republicans’ earliest and most sustained battle with the administration so far. Paxton’s successful lawsuit challenged one of Biden’s first immigration actions. Republicans have blamed his administration’s shift from the restrictive policies of the Trump White House for creating a migrant surge there now — though the surge began late in Trump’s term.
Border Patrol reported more than 100,000 encounters with migrants crossing into the U.S. from Mexico in February, a 28 percent jump from the month before.
The Biden administration has said its focus is establishing an “orderly” and “humane” way of handling the surge of immigrants, largely Central Americans fleeing violence, poverty and political upheaval. But newly minted immigration officials in Biden’s Cabinet say they’re having to build that system from the ground up after the Trump administration “intentionally made it worse.”
At least three Texas Republicans — Abbott, U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Houston and U.S. Sen. John Cornyn — made high-profile trips to the border to highlight the first major crisis of the Biden administration. Democrats representing Texas border communities have joined them in warning of a looming crisis as they’ve urged the administration to take stronger action.