The Lone Tsar State (not a typo)

Greg Abbott the Terrible is on a roll...

It was quite a performance: arrogant; cruel in its disregard for fellow citizens; righteous in its self-confidence, yet woefully uninformed.  Ivan the Terrible or any other absolute monarch would have been proud. 

And so were loyal Texas Republicans who were watching Governor Greg Abbott’s Sept. 7 press conference.  But anyone else, particularly women, might have had to hold back the regurgitation of their lunches more than just a few times.  

A beaming Abbott--wearing a light gray, wide-lapeled suit; white shirt; and red-and-white striped tie fashioned into a jaunty Windsor knot--could apparently not have been happier to prate on about his state’s oppressively restrictive voting and
abortion laws. 

The voting law enacted sweeping new restrictions, adding to those already on the books in Texas and augmenting the state’s reputation as having some of the most restrictive election rules in the country.  More will be explained about this law in a subsequent installment of the Resistant Grandmother’s “Texas:The Lone Tsar State” postings.

The other law discussed in Abbott’s press conference aimed for all intents and purposes to eliminate or restrict to the point of non-existence a woman’s right to an abortion in the state of Texas, a protection afforded by existing precedent, Roe v. Wade passed by a 7-2 U.S. Supreme Court majority in 1973.

A challenge to the Texas law with the legal name “Whole Woman’s Health et al vs. Austin Reeve, Jackson, Judge, et al.” made its way up to the Supreme Court and was decided Thursday, Sept. 2, in an unsigned 5-4 opinion issued late into the night. In the terse one-page document, the Court chose not to overturn but rather to greenlight the repressive law and, by so doing, nullify existing constitutional precedent.

The five Supreme Court justices who allowed the repressive Texas law to stand were Samuel Alito, Amy Barrett, Neal Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and
Clarence Thomas.

The State’s new law restricts abortions to a time limit of about six weeks after a woman’s last menstrual cycle, which Roe v. Wade does not. Worse, however, it also includes a provision of a kind not seen since the Fugitive Slave Act of the 18th and 19th centuries, which allows for a state to in essence deputize residents to sue anyone who aids or carries out restricted abortions and with the added incentive of earning bounties of $10,000 for their actions. Sitting Justice Sonia Sotomayor described the bounties as “cash prizes” in her dissent. The Fugitive Slave Act was repealed in 1864 during the Civil War when the U.S. Congress did not include representatives from the Southern secessionist states. 

 Nullifying the Constitution

The law is so egregious that U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Sept. 9 a U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit against the State of Texas not only for the injustice it imposes on Texas women, but also for its threat to constitutional law:
“If it prevails, it may become a model for action in other areas by other states and with respect to other constitutional rights and judicial precedents...This kind of scheme to nullify the Constitution of the United States is one that all Americans, whatever their politics or party, should fear,” Garland said. 

Out of Tune

During Abbott’s press conference while answering questions also about the new abortion restrictions, Abbott’s upbeat energy and lightly-hued fashion palette seemed out of sync with the seriousness of the moment. Additionally, Abbott’s comments that were meant to pass for policy justifications were bizarre, incomplete, and often incomprehensible. And yet, non-answers and platitudes were substituted in exchange for substantive responses, and Abbott’s raised voice in righteous indignation and practiced intonation offered a poor substitute for truth.

 So obviously...

 In answer to a question posed by local reporter Alex Rozier, who asked why a rape victim should have to carry a pregnancy to term, Abbott’s ignorance of women’s sexuality took front and center as he answered: “It (the law) doesn’t require that at all because, so obviously, it provides at least six weeks for a person to be able to get an abortion,” Abbott said.

But if Abbott and any other of the bill’s authors had checked, they may have found that the physical and emotional realities associated with the female reproductive cycle would not support such a sweeping assertion, especially in the “so obviously” manner Abbott suggests.

 Facts, Schmacts...

Medical information readily available either on the Internet or from Texas experts could have disabused the law’s writers of the exaggerated simplicity of the law’s reasoning.

For example, according to online information provided by the Office on Women’s Health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the often varying nature of the female reproductive cycle belies the hard-and-fast six week timeline at the heart of the new law:
“Each woman’s cycle length may be different, and the time between ovulation and when the next period starts can be anywhere from one week (7 days) to more than two weeks (19 days).”
New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a Sept. 8 CNN interview with Anderson Cooper had a difficult time holding back her derision of Abbott’s and the law’s ignorance of the vagaries of a woman’s menstrual cycle.
“(Abbott) is not familiar with a menstruating person’s body, because if he (was) he should know that six weeks pregnant means two weeks late for your period.  And two weeks late on your period can happen if you’re stressed, if your diet changes, or for really no reason at all. So you don’t have six weeks,” she said.

Young rape victims at special risk

The Texas abortion law also importantly makes no exceptions for rape or incest. A young girl raped by a male relative, for example, is afforded only about two weeks after a missed period to detect the pregnancy and somehow make whatever abortion arrangements she can, otherwise risk having to carry the fetus to term and take on the lifetime commitment of mothering a child caused by a violent sexual act. This especially oppresses young girls who are often not familiar enough with the nature of their own menstrual cycles to accurately identify whether they are “late” or not.

Texas law also imposes the additional burden of requiring parental consent for an abortion--hard to come by from parents who either caused the pregnancy or looked the other way while it happened. Texas minors may get permission from a court to bypass the parental consent requirement, but this too becomes much more complicated--and unlikely--given the law’s accelerated timeline.  According to a Sept. 8 report by Alexandra Svokos of ABC News, “...it may not be realistically feasible for a teen to confirm a pregnancy, go through the court system for a judge’s sign-off, and book an abortion appointment within two weeks of a missed period after being raped.”

No meat on the bones

Undeterred from making additional comments that revealed a willful lack of understanding of a topic that would affect the lives of women in his state, Abbott persisted while surrounded by a phalanx of mostly older white men. In following up on a question about the victims of rape or incest, Abbott vehemently asserted that women in his state need no longer worry about rape in the future, but declined to provide any material information as to how or why that would be the case:
“Rape is a crime, and Texas will work tirelessly to make sure that we eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas by aggressively going out and arresting them and prosecuting them and getting them off the streets.”

Abbott should know, because while he has been governor of the state since 2015, Texas has gained the dubious distinction of being at the top of the list of states having the most rapes. In 2019 the “society, crime, and law enforcement statistics portal” statistica reported Texas surpassed all other states with the highest number of forcible rapes.

Given that most rapes occur within a home by either husbands or boyfriends against their partners or with children, it is difficult to envision how rapists will be spotted on the streets unless they self-identify by wearing signs around their necks or are reported by family members, which can be a life-affecting decision in an of itself. 

The inability to identify rapists “on the streets” or anywhere for that matter renders Abbott’s pledge to track them down a non-starter. According to a Sept. 8 report in the Austin American-Statesman, a RAINN (for Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network) 2020 study, citing a U.S. Justice Department report in 2020, 310 out of every 10,000 rapes are reported to police. Of those 310, just 50 lead to arrest, resulting in just 25 out of 1,000 rapes resulting in incarceration.”

The Austin American-Statesman cited another study by the University of Texas Institute on Domestic Violence and Assault (IDVSA) which said, ”In Texas, the IDVSA study reported a lower rate of victims reporting sexual violence to law enforcement, finding 9.2 percent of victims reporting, meaning more than 90 percent of assaults are unreported.”

In a 2019 study, the Texas Department of Safety reported more than 14,000 rapes, with charges resulting for less than a quarter of reported cases, or 23.7 percent”

Why don’t women in Texas or other places report rape? “Trauma and the impact of immediate trauma and post trauma play a big role in reporting or a decision not to report,” University of Texas IDVSA director Noel Busch-Armendariz said.  But Governor Abbott did not reference any U.S. Department of Justice statistics or IDVSA research as informing his views.

Abbott also did not mention still another possible means of tackling Texas’s rape problem: an all-out effort to use the more than 6,000 rape kits currently gathering dust on shelves in Texas clinics and hospitals. In a Feb. 2, 2021 op-ed posted in the Dallas Morning News by U.S. Senator from Texas John Cornyn, Cornyn said: “(These) Rape kits...in Texas labs represent unidentified criminals that could be named and prosecuted, even halting repeat rapists.”

All hat...

A quick review by me of Texas newspaper reporting on the subject did not reveal any definitive reasons for the backlog, other than general statements by various concerned groups about a lack of training or awareness of their importance. Given the publicity afforded the topic by the state’s senior U.S. Senator, however, one could have assumed the Texas Governor might have embraced the kits as an immediate means of attacking the rape issue, but he did not. Also missing from any (non-existent) list of action items to get rapists off Texas streets was a call-to-action for an all-out, aggressive prosecution of rape cases, which Texas--not unlike other states--does
not do.

Nor was the topic of any future anti-rapist legislation teed up in the “call sheets” which specify governor initiatives to be taken up by the Legislature in upcoming special sessions. Minus any “meat on the bones” of Abbott’s pledge to eliminate rape in Texas, Abbott’s remarks prompted an image in my mind of the archetypal, impotent Texas blowhard who has no real wealth behind his bluster, as described by the favorite Texas phrase, “all hat and no ranch.”

  Abbott’s refusal to back up his promise with tangible action reminded the Resistant Grandmother of another empty promise--one given 26 years ago in one of the most infamous domestic abuse-related trials of the century. On Oct. 3, 1995 after a Los Angeles jury acquitted celebrity-athlete O.J. Simpson of the murders of his wife Nicole and her friend Ron Goldman, Simpson promised he’d work tirelessly to track down the “real killers.” 

It was a vow made on camera that Simpson neither followed up on nor ever again mentioned as he proceeded to spend the next 12 years essentially on the golf course. Simpson’s golf game was interrupted in 2007, however, when he was arrested for robbery, found guilty, and sentenced to 33 years in prison.  In October 2017, Simpson was freed on parole having served only nine of the 33-year sentence.  Yet still, “the real killers” remain at large.

In the same way Simpson’s promise to track down his wife’s “real killers” was met with immediate skepticism, Abbott’s apparent insincerity launched a torrent of not unexpected derision including that from Donald Trump niece Mary Trump who Tweeted, “Who knew that getting rid of rape would be so easy?”--suggesting that if simple declarations to get rid of rape could be presented as a fait accompli as Abbott did, it’s a wonder that, throughout the course of human events, such an obvious solution to the problem had not appeared until now.

  L’etat est Abbott!

Given Texas’ dictatorial approach to governing, the Resistant Grandmother joins others in wondering what the American Revolution was fought for in the first place. Or what the more than a million American soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, World Wars I and II, and any domestic and international struggle ever since gave their lives for?  The Declaration of Independence of 1776 rejected the notion of an imperial government that determined the lives of citizens by fiat. And we have lived under the spirit of that determination ever since--until now.

Texas, which has existed under a one-party (Republican) system since the 1990s has ushered in the techniques of monarchy and dressed them up in the not-quite-fashionable manner of Greg Abbott's light gray, wide-lapeled suit, white shirt, and Windsor-knotted tie.  And looking up the behavior of past tyrants and monarchs, I actually found some similarities to what’s going on now in Texas and other red states.

   For example, in his uncaring attitude and certainty in his own righteousness, Abbott follows in the footsteps of (Mad) King Ludwig of Bavaria whose father King Maximillian complained, “What can I say to him? My son takes no interest in what others say to him.”
And Ivan the Terrible of Russia also exhibited hostility toward pregnant women. Ivan beat to death his pregnant daughter-in-law Yelena for wearing clothing the tsar had considered “immodest.” Then when his son objected, he killed him too.

King Louis XVI of France, the last monarch of that country’s Ancien Regime, famously discounted the effects on France’s middle and lower classes by deregulating the grain market, leading to bread shortages and near-starvation during bad harvests. And the alleged flippant “Let them eat cake” comment by Louis’ wife Marie Antoinette would only add to the mob’s growing dissatisfaction with the French king and queen, eventually taking down the French monarchy and taking off his and Marie Antoinette’s heads.
Then there was George III, the English king whose excessive exercise of power brought about the dissolution of the thirteen American colonies’ loyalty to the mother country. George, who was actually reputed to be a kind man in private, hid his softer side from the Colonies by imposing punitive taxes and inconveniencing his subjects as he did with the Stamp Act and stationing German mercenary soldiers fighting for the British in colonists’ homes. By 1776, the Colonists responded “enough is enough” and declared their independence from the king.

Calling Netflix…

This notion that states like Texas are devolving to monarchies was echoed by late night TV host Seth Meyers who said on the night following Abbott’s press conference that America as a whole might as well be living under a monarchy, given the dissolution of democratic freedoms as assisted by five out of nine Supreme Court Justices whose action in support of Texas’ abortion scheme reminded him of an imperial authoritarian mindset:
“They gutted a woman’s right to choose in Texas and who knows where next despite never commanding a majority of support from the American people. And they don’t give a s*** because they’re there for life.”
Then zeroing in, Meyers added:
“I mean if that’s how our government is going to work we might as well have a
monarchy. At least we’d have more messy tabloid drama and a Netflix show
where the men get played by actors who are way better-looking than the
actual royals.”

In short, the Resistant Grandmother joins Meyers and others who fear the extra-legal mindset reflected both in the Supreme Court’s dead-of-night decision and Texas and other states’ attempts to circumvent democracy by passing laws or exerting other actions that take away freedoms previously guaranteed to Americans. For example, just since the Texas abortion decision, Republican South Dakota governor Kristi Noem signed an executive order to limit abortion access in her state. 

The pattern of governance in Republican states throughout the nation seems clear: truncate the democratic process by passing laws that the now-very conservative U.S. Supreme Court would be sympathetic to upholding, use one-party dominance of state legislatures to bypass or eliminate voting rights that have existed since the inception of the republic that could check their actions, use executive orders to minimize or deplete rights rather than open up topics for public discussion, and use sleight-of-hand wording in laws and legal challenges that cover-up their underlying designs.

For all of this, Ludwig, Ivan, Louis XVI, and George III would undoubtedly give an enthusiastic thumbs up.