Just last year, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott joined a bipartisan chorus of governors in denouncing a Biden administration plan they said would strip states of powers guaranteed to them under federal law.
The plan would have transferred Air National Guard units from six states to the U.S. Space Force, the newly created military branch, stoking concerns about federal overreach and the erosion of governors’ control over their own guard forces. Texas wasn’t among the affected states, but Abbott made his opposition unmistakable in an open letter to the president.
He called the plan an “intolerable threat that would set a “dangerous precedent.”
“I strongly oppose any attempt to sideline governors when it comes to their respective National Guards,” he wrote.
A year later, Abbott helped Donald Trump do just that. He said that he “fully authorized” the president’s plan to send Texas National Guard members to Illinois and Oregon to protect federal law enforcement personnel who are executing immigration laws. Those states’ governors vigorously objected, saying such action was an unnecessary escalation that interfered with state sovereignty.
The conservatives and the Republicans have always been full of shit in every key talking point they ever used. They only care about “states rights” when it comes to stripping away human rights.
They don’t give a shit about liberty or the Constitution, either.
“States’ rights” is a bullshit argument and always has been a bullshit argument
While Trump is blowing bubba…Abbott is blowing Trump.
Greg Abbott has never been about state rights. He’s a contrarian for the sake of being “different”. Broken dip shit has no idea how to be a decent person anymore.
Yeah, there is a common misconception that conservatism is about “small government” and “States rights.”
In reality, these reactionaries will use any kind of bad-faith argument, distraction, distortion, or outright lie to consolidate power for their white-supremacist christofascist project.
Their only true principle is that they can tell other people what to do and how to live. The purpose of every single policy and process that they push is to defend and entrench the hierarchy from which they benefit.
Yep. It’s always been about their perverted notion of “liberty”, meaning, the Southern kind.
He does know how to get down on his knees.
They never care about “states rights” they value it when its useful to enforce their agenda and don’t care for it when it interferes just like the southern states hated states not cooperating with “slave catchers”.
Lol
Wouldn’t it be nice if we only owed taxes when the party in power is the same as ours? We could call it “partisan taxpaying”.
Abbott’s arguments then and actions now are an example of what Jessica Bulman-Pozen, a constitutional law professor at Columbia University, calls partisan federalism, a term describing how state leaders’ fervor for defending their sovereignty increasingly depends on whether their party is in power in Washington. She said Abbott’s support of the guard deployments is particularly alarming because it diminishes the traditional power of governors to manage law enforcement in their states.
