Top GOP Leaders Decry Court Decision
While Ignoring Conservative Swing Votes

Capitol Inside
June 30, 2022

Governor Greg and other high-ranking GOP state leaders took shots at Democratic President Joe Biden on Thursday after a pair of Republican judges sided with the U.S. Supreme Court's three liberals in a ruling that cleared the way for the cancellation of a federal immigration policy that Donald Trump had in effect.

Attorney General Ken Paxton got the Biden bashing under way this morning in a tweet that expressed disappointment on the decision on the so-called Remain-in-Mexico program that's prevented some migrants from entering the U.S. Paxton vowed to retaliate in the judiciary. "I will con’t to fight to secure our border & hold Biden accountable in my dozen other border-security suits in federal court," the state's top lawyer tweeted.

Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said in a Twitter post early this afternoon that he was "very disappointed" that the high court that conservatives control issued an opinion that would be "devastating for Texas & the entire nation."

But Patrick made his social media appraisal of the SCOTUS opinion deeply personal as well. "Biden doesn’t care about our country or lives - he only sees these as future voters," Patrick asserted in the tweet. .

None of the GOP power triad's members indicated if they'd been informed that Justices Brian Kavanaugh and John Roberts cast the swing votes in favor of the Biden's administration's position on Remain-in-Mexico. Roberts and Kavanaugh were appointed to the nation's highest bench by Republicans George W. Bush and Trump respectively during their White House stints.

Abbott made it clear he thinks this is all Biden's fault despite the reality of the 5-4 ruling that effectively put the Supreme Court in the Democrats' corner on immigration. The SCOTUS decision on the Remain-in-Mexico policy should have effect of tempering the Republicans' perceptions of the high court as a rubber stamp for red states just one week after it overturned the landmark abortion case Roe v. Wade and raised the specter of more attacks on women's rights as an encore.

While Abbott stopped short of criticizing the Supreme Court directly, he pinned the blame on Biden exclusively even though the president didn't have a vote in the matter.

“The Supreme Court’s decision upholding DHS’s termination of the Remain-in-Mexico policy will only embolden the Biden Administration’s open border policies," Abbott said in an email. "More than fifty people recently died in a trailer—people who were allowed to cross our border illegally because of President Biden’s policies. Reinstating and fully enforcing Remain-in-Mexico would deter thousands more migrants from making that deadly trek, and President Biden should take that simple step to secure the border because it is the only humane thing to do.”

The Kavanaugh and Roberts votes appeared invisible to the Abbott re-election campaign, which contended that Democrat Beto O'Rourke backed the immigration policy's revoking. Abbott communications director Mark Miner called the ending of the Remain-in-Mexico policy as a move that "will make Texas less safe by releasing thousands of illegal immigrants into the country with little more than a promise they attend immigration proceedings." 

more to come ...