Activist Comes Out of Seclusion with a Vengeance
in Rhetorical Crushing of Governor His Staff Mocked

By Mike Hailey
Capitol Inside Editor
August 10, 2020

The conservative activist who blew up Texas House Speaker Dennis Bonnen's political career resurfaced from a summer hibernation on Monday with a blistering attack on Governor Greg Abbott less than two months after a pair of associates were caught making fun of the fact that he's confined to a wheelchair.

"While I was enjoying a productive summer, Gov. Greg Abbott was not," Empower Texans CEO Michael Quinn Sullivan said in an email to supporters. "He saw his popularity plummet faster than the state’s economy under the weight of his ham-handed approach to the Chinese coronavirus pandemic. He had a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad summer."

Sullivan kicked off his own summer in June when he apologized profusely to Abbott for the behavior of two top Empower Texans staffers who made fun of the governor's disability at the end of a podcast when they didn't realize that the tape recorder was still rolling.

Sullivan - the most high-profile and aggressive crusader on the hard right in Texas throughout the past decade - suspended the colleagues for the epic gaffe before disappearing himself from the public eye in the immediate wake of the accidental audio's viral spread across the Internet.

But Sullivan suggested in his first Texas Minute since the day his colleagues were exposed that the timing of his sudden fall off the grid had simply been a coincidence. Sullivan explained that the Empower Texans board had asked him in January to take a break this summer to reflect on the group's efforts in the past 14 years as a springboard to a game plan for the future.

Sullivan was in vintage form today - calling attention to Abbott's plunging popularity numbers as a result of the actions as the sole commander of the state's response to the coronavirus crisis.

Sullivan pointed out that Abbott had supported a couple of veteran Republican state lawmakers who were unseated in the primary runoff election last month when the governor also backed James Dickey in a failed bid for re-election as the Texas GOP chairman. Sullivan noted that new state Republican Party Chairman Allen West had joined tea party lawmakers in calls for an emergency special session that Abbott has ignored.

"The summer began with Gov. Abbott saying mask mandates represented an infringement on citizens’ rights," Sullivan said. "Two weeks later, Abbott issued a statewide mask mandate that might as well have been drafted by the governor of California – and with no expiration date in sight.

"This left local law enforcement officials trying to figure out if they were not supposed to enforce mask mandates, as Abbott had said ... or if they were supposed to enforce mask mandates, as Abbott had also said."