While Ted Cruz was rushing back from Cancun under heavy criticism for leaving a state in crisis, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was doing something neither of Texas' senators bothered with: trying to help Texans who were, and are, cold, hungry, without water, and sometimes downright desperate. By the time Cruz had (one hopes) warmed up the pet poodle he'd left behind, 25 people had died of hypothermia or other cold-weather-related issues.
The same day, Ocasio-Cortez, who worked for a decade in Texas for the National Hispanic Institute, raised $2 million for struggling Texans by appealing to her 12.4 million Twitter followers for support. She jetted to Houston on Friday to talk things over with a Democratic House rep there. The money will go to charities including food banks, an elder care organization, and others.
The Atlantic's David Graham thinks that Cruz's real sin is his inability to come up with ANY ideas to help Texans. He has power to buck up people's morale, to round up resources by persuasion, to set up a help line. He couldn't. He didn't try. To be fair, neither did John Cornyn, the other Texas senator.
If you think it's a tragedy that a 75-year-old vet died of hypothermia -- after the power cut out and deprived him of his oxygen supply -- well, I agree with you. But it is more than that; it is an outrage. For Texas politicians, though, the deaths of powerless people would seem to be mere collateral damage, if not a boon to the government coffers.
Indeed, Governor Gregg Abbott saw fit to criticize AOC's support for the "Green New Deal," which he told Fox host Sean Hannity on Tuesday “would be a deadly deal for the United States of America.” Abbott then blamed wind turbines' freezing for Texas's power failures.
Both statements were lies. The Green New Deal hasn't touched Texas. Only 10 percent of Texas's power comes from wind power, and if that had been the only power source that had konked out, Texans would have been frolicking in the snow instead of fearing for their lives. But no -- 80 percent of the power failure was from natural gas, coal and nuclear plants that buckled in the cold.
“Charity isn’t a replacement for good governance, but we won’t turn away from helping people in need when things hit the fan,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.
It is a shame that Texas politicians don't feel the same way.
Is Texas uniquely craven in its approach to caring for its most vulnerable citizens? Do you think this experience could wake up Texans to the possibility of voting for Democrats? Have you heard of anything that Republican politicians have done to help during the crisis?
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