Abbott learns it’s hard to keep GOP base happy during pandemic

Gov. Greg Abbott can’t catch a break these days.

Texans on both sides of the aisle have been frustrated by his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. His approval rating on the subject has dropped from 61 percent in April to 38 percent in July, according to a survey by four major universities.

Still, it’s a bit surprising to see a sitting Republican governor, re-elected by a double-digit margin in 2018, on the receiving end of a lawsuit from legislators in his own party.

“In a crisis, you usually see this kind of rally-around-the-flag effect, and we’re not,” observed

Emily Farris, a political scientist at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth.

The Houston-based conservative activist and physician Steven Hotze, she noted, has filed several lawsuits against state and local officials since the pandemic began. These include one against Abbott in July after the governor, responding to a surge in cases following his reopening of the state in May, issued an executive order that mandated masks in businesses and most public places. But Hotze’s latest lawsuit, Farris continued, has more institutional backing. The other plaintiffs include six Republican lawmakers as well as Keith Nielson and Allen West, the chairs of the Harris County and state Republican parties, respectively.

“It seems like there’s really a deterioration between Abbott and the rest of his party,” Farris said.

That’s putting it mildly.

The new lawsuit, filed Wednesday, takes aim at the governor’s

July executive order extending the early-voting period by six days. Abbott has ordered early voting to start on Oct. 13, instead of Oct. 19, and continue until Oct. 30.

The move seems like a sage one, given that the new coronavirus, responsible for the deaths of more than 15,000 Texans, has yet to be contained. More days of early voting will essentially help spread out the arrival of voters to the polls, in turn helping efforts

to maintain social distancing and sanitizing procedures during in-person voting.

And Abbott’s announcement also marked a moment of welcome bipartisanship, as Republicans and Democrats continue to spar over the potential expansion of mail-in voting across the state. Texas Democratic Party chair Gilbert Hinojosa welcomed the news as “a step,” albeit “the bare minimum.”

Still, those considerations are ultimately irrelevant, according to state Rep. Steve Toth, a Republican who represents part of Montgomery County and joined the lawsuit along with state Reps. Bill Zedler, Cecil Bell, Jr., Dan Flynn, and state Sens. Charles Perry and Pat Fallon.

In a letter to Abbott this week, Toth declared himself “a former ardent supporter.”

“Throughout this crisis, you have shown an appalling lack of consistency, leadership, and concern for the small-business owners that are the primary driver of the Texas economy,” he wrote.

Toth told me that Abbott simply doesn’t have the authority to extend the earlyvoting period by fiat.

“This is something that’s not in the purview of the governor,” Toth said.

The plaintiffs note in their brief that the Texas Election Code defines the early voting period as “the 17th day before election day … through the fourth day before election day.”

Abbott noted that, too, in his executive order, but invoked his powers under the Texas Disaster Act to suspend that section of the code.

Toth countered that the executive order that Abbott issued in July “does not give him the ability or the right to unilaterally make decisions about everything.”

And there’s a proper way to make such changes, Toth argues: “The governor should convene a special session. This should be something that the Legislature comes together on. I would love to hear both sides of the argument, the pros and the cons — let’s consider it.”

The plaintiffs have a point: the Texas Disaster Act, passed in 1975, empowers the governor to declare disasters in all or part of the state — and having done so, the power to suspend certain rules and regulations that would hinder the state’s response to the emergency. But the breadth of the governor’s emergency powers isn’t specified, which is troubling .

Abbott’s interpretation of his own powers under the Disaster Act has been expansive. Future governors may, for good or ill, take the same view of things.

This is something a future Legislature should revisit, sooner rather than later, now that questions about the scope of the law have been raised.

For the time being, though, we’re still in the midst of a pandemic. Coronavirus expert Peter Hotez, for one, has recently warned that Houston might be headed for a “third peak” this fall. Under such circumstances, Abbott’s decision to expand the early voting period is a reasonable and eminently defensible one.

The fact that the governor is being sued over such a decision is a measure of the ersatz authority he’s accorded to his party’s right wing by taking such an equivocal approach to public safety measures in the first place, seemingly in response to pressure from the GOP base.

Texans who have been following state government closely would be hard-pressed to disagree.

If Abbott isn’t catching any breaks lately, he has only himself to blame.