Freedom Caucus Five Escalate Internal Party Warfare
with Attack on Abbott Who Gets Passive Trump Snub

By Mike Hailey
Capitol Inside Editor
August 5, 2020

The Texas GOP continued on the path to self-destruction on Wednesday with a handful of tea party lawmakers accusing Governor Greg Abbott of constitutional offenses with his pandemic direction while President Donald Trump insulted him with a newfound position on mail voting.

In one of the more bizarre moves of his presidency, Trump declared on Tuesday night that Florida was the only state that has a system that's clean enough to conduct an election with a substantial increase in postal votes. The president had been an ardent foe of mail ballots until discovering that his posturing on the issue was costing a significant amount of support in the must-win Sunshine State.

Republicans in other states have been breaking ranks with Trump increasingly on mail balloting amid the realization that it has strong support on both sides of the aisle. But Abbott and the Republicans here like Attorney General Ken Paxton have been ignoring the trend with a rigid adherence to the original Trump position.

With State Senator Bob Hall of Edgewood as an apparent ringleader, the group that includes four Texas House Republicans sued Abbott and the Texas Health and Human Services Commission over a COVID-19 contact tracing contract that they see as a thinly-veiled attempt by the government to spy on them.

The lawsuit that the five conservatives filed this week in a Travis County district court also features State Reps. Kyle Biedermann of Fredericksburg, Mike Lang of Granbury, Steve Toth of The Woodlands and Bill Zedler of Arlington as Hall's co-plaintiffs and Texas Freedom Caucus colleagues.

Hall and the House quartet contend that Abbott overstepped his constitutional bounds by refusing to give the Legislature a role in the state's response to the contagion that he's directed exclusively since the initial outbreak. The plaintiff lawmaker group also asserts that the governor violated competitive bidding requirements with the awarding of a $295 million contact tracing contract under the guise of having absolute power during a public health emergency that he'd deemed as an official disaster. Some Republicans on the far right are scared that the process of contact tracing that health experts says is essential in the fight with the coronavirus will give vengeful tyrants the ability to track down political dissidents.

None of the legislators who've taken Abbott and the state to court think they have anything to lose in the general election less than three months from now with the legal attack on the Republican governor.

Zedler and Lang aren't seeking re-election while Hall isn't on the ballot again this year midway through a four year term. Biedermann is running for a new term in a battle with a Democrat in a heavily Republican district in south Central Texas. A Montgomery County resident in the suburbs north of Houston, Toth is the only plaintiff in the group who's competing for a new term in a district that could be in the Democrats' reach in the event of a massive blue wave in November.

The group is being represented in the legal challenge by Warren Norred - an Arlington attorney who'd represented the Texas Republican Party last month in a failed attempt at the courthouse to resurrect the state convention that Houston officials eventually scuttled to protect the public health and safety.

Norred teamed with GOP State Rep. Briscoe Cain of Deer Park as the lawyers for the state GOP in the convention revival challenge that bounced from the Texas Supreme Court to the federal courthouse as a desperation maneuver that appeared to have no chance for success.

But the maneuvering has sparked unsubstantiated speculation inside the Austin beltway that Cisco fracking billionaire Farris Wilks is pulling the strings on legal attack on the governor's power during a major emergency when the Legislature is not in session.

Wilks could be unhappy with Abbott as a consequence of his intervention on the winners' behalf in state and local battles that the megadonor's son-in-law and Lang lost in blowouts in the primary runoff election last month in bids for state representative and county commissioner respectively. Wilks had expected his candidates as the early apparent favorites.

The legal attack on Abbott's powers by fellow Republicans will put the party's majority in the Texas House in even deeper peril with the potential for a massive blue wave in the fall when the Democrats would seize control of the chamber with a net gain of nine seats or more.