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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Vivian Ho (now) and Daniel Strauss (earlier)

Texas storm: Biden to declare major disaster to secure federal aid – as it happened

Mark Majkrzak gives out bottles of water to people in need on Friday in Austin, Texas.
Mark Majkrzak gives out bottles of water to people in need on Friday in Austin, Texas. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Evening summary

  • New Mexico overturned a dormant, 52-year-old ban on some abortion medical procedures.
  • Joe Biden told reporters that he would stand by Neera Tanden and not pull her nomination, despite Joe Manchin indicating he would vote against it.
  • All registered voters in California will receive mail-in ballots for any and all elections in 2021, according to law signed by Gavin Newsom - and that includes a recall of Newsom, if it reaches the ballot.

Updated

Over here in California, governor Gavin Newsom just signed into law a bill requiring that every registered voter in the state be mailed a ballot in an election in 2021. Politico’s Jeremy White pointed out that would include any recall effort for the man who signed the bill into law.

In a state as large as California – and a population as varied – calls to recall Newsom are nothing new. Rural swaths of the inland empire and the north have long felt overlooked by Sacramento, and are by far more conservative than their coastal counterparts.

But as my colleague Maanvi Singh reported earlier this month, this long-lived discontent gained new legs in the pandemic, getting support from far-right groups, mainstream Republicans and some Silicon Valley bigwigs.

While his fast action was applauded early in the pandemic, Newsom’s approval rating plummeted with the second state lockdown, as parents and teachers called for schools to reopen.

Then, of course, there was the French Laundry incident, where he attended an indoor birthday party at the opulent wine country restaurant after repeatedly telling Californians to avoid small indoor gatherings.

As Maanvi reports, most political observers do not think a recall effort will be successful in a state that is 46.1% registered Democrats and 24.2% registered Republicans, even if those who oppose Newsom manage to get it onto a ballot. Read more about it here:

Updated

Here’s a fun little tidbit in the Ted Cruz saga. The Texas Democratic Party acted swiftly yesterday when news broke about the senator’s ill-timed trip to Cancún and snagged the URL, FlyinTedCruz.com – a play on Donald Trump’s “Lyin’ Ted” nickname for Cruz when they ran against each other in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries.

The link goes to a page for Feeding Texas, to raise money to support Texans during the winter storm emergency.

Updated

New Mexico overturns ban on abortion procedures

Meanwhile, in New Mexico, a Democrat-led legislature has overturned a dormant 1969 ban on most abortion procedures.

The 1969 law made it so a medical termination of a pregnancy was only allowed with the permission of a specialized hospital board in instances of incest, rape reported to law enforcement, grave medical risks to the woman or grave medical defects in the fetus.

Because of the Roe v Wade ruling by the US supreme court in 1973, the law had ultimately been dormant in the historically blue and heavily Roman Catholic state.

With talk of overturning Roe v Wade growing among Republicans, the 1969 law would have reverted back into place if that have ever happened. This repeal ensures that will not.

Updated

Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has already indicated that he would oppose Neera Tanden’s to be director of the Office of Management and Budget, in part because of combative statements she has made on Twitter.

Despite this, Joe Biden says he will not pull her nomination.

Updated

Hey all, Vivian Ho on the west coast, taking over the blog for Daniel Strauss.

It appears now that billionaire biotech investor Dr Patrick Soon-Shiong may not be selling the Los Angeles Times.

Evening summary

That’s it for me. I’m passing the blogging baton to Vivian Ho.

Here’s what happened today:

  • Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia said he would oppose Neera Tanden’s nomination to be director of the Office of Management and Budget.
  • A report in The Wall Street Journal said The Los Angeles Times’ owner is thinking of selling the publication.
  • Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined calls for an investigation of governor Andrew Cuomo’s handling of nursing homes in New York during the coronavirus pandemic.
  • Joe Biden is planning on making a disaster declaration for Texas.
  • In his appearance at the G7 Biden also assured global allies that he will reverse Donald Trump’s legacy.

Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia will oppose Neera Tanden’s nomination to be director of the Office of Management and Budget.

A few things to keep in mind here. In a 50-50 split Senate like this one any senator’s opposition to a nomination is very influential.

Manchin’s statement is also notable for why he’s opposing Tanden. Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, has been an avid and combative Twitter user, oftentimes using the platform to excoriate members of both parties. That has become a liability for her nomination. In confirmation hearings she has said she regretted those past tweets.

Manchin’s statement is also devoid of any mention of more substantive criticism Tanden has received, such as some of the donations the liberal think tank received under Tanden’s tenure or her feuding supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Once, according to The New York Times citing a person in the room, Tanden punched Faz Shakir, then the top editor of the think tank’s marquee blog. Shakir would eventually go on to serve as Sanders’ presidential campaign manager. Tanden, an outspoken Hillary Clinton supporter, was a regular critic of Sanders’ candidacy.

Updated

The Wall Street Journal’s Lukas I. Alpert reports that billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong is considering possibly selling the Los Angeles Times. Here are the key paragraphs:

When Mr. Soon-Shiong acquired the Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune and a handful of weeklies from Tribune Publishing Co. TPCO -0.06% , then called Tronc Inc., in 2018, it was met with great fanfare from staff and media watchers after years of turmoil and downsizing at the publications. At the time, he said that the sale represented the beginning of a new era and that he intended to do what it took to make the business viable for the next 100 years.

He has since grown dissatisfied with the news organization’s slow expansion of its digital audience and its substantial losses, the people said. He also has increasingly come to believe that the Los Angeles Times and San Diego Union-Tribune—together known as the California Times company—would be better served if they were part of a larger media group, they said.

Mr. Soon-Shiong has been heavily focused on efforts by his immunotherapy company to develop a Covid-19 vaccine and has had little time to devote to the Times, people familiar with the matter said. “Covid really brought him back to the lab,” said one of the people.

Mr. Soon-Shiong didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment and a spokeswoman for the Times had no immediate comment.

Not long after the Journal story went live Soon-Shiong denied the article’s accuracy.

Updated

AOC wants ‘full investigation’ into Cuomo on nursing homes

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has joined growing calls for an investigation into New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s handling of nursing homes during the coronavirus pandemic.

“I … stand with our local officials calling for a full investigation of the Cuomo administration’s handling of nursing homes during Covid-19,” the high-profile progressive congresswoman, who represents a New York City district, said in a statement on Friday.

Last week, it was revealed that a Cuomo aide told New York legislators the true picture of nursing home deaths wasn’t given last year, for fear it would be used against the governor during an investigation launched by Donald Trump’s justice department.

Cuomo, who has already published a book about his handling of the crisis, has dismissed claims of wrongdoing. On Friday, he said information was not produced fast enough, which created “a void. And conspiracy theories and politics and rumors fill that void and you can’t allow inaccurate information to go unanswered.”

But in January, New York state attorney general Leticia James said nursing home deaths from Covid-19 were undercounted by as much as 50%. Now, federal prosecutors in New York City and the FBI are reported to be investigating and state officials are seeking to strip Cuomo of emergency powers.

The governor is under increasing pressure and Ocasio-Cortez’s intervention adds drama to a combustible mix.

True to form, the Biden administration is declining to weigh in on Ted Cruz’s Cancun trip.

This is very much in line with how the Biden administration is trying to approach daily news cycles. They say they are focused on their major policy initiatives and rarely (at least compared to the last administration) weigh in.

My colleague Oliver Milman reported out the Biden administration’s decision to rejoin the Paris climate accord:

The US has marked its return to the Paris agreement by urging countries to do more to confront the climate crisis, with America’s climate envoy, John Kerry, warning that international talks this year are the “last, best hope” of avoiding catastrophic global heating.

On Friday, the US officially returned to the Paris climate accord, 107 days after it left at the behest of former president Donald Trump. Joe Biden moved to reverse this on his first day in office and Kerry conceded that the US is returning “with a lot of humility, for the agony of the last four years”.

“This is a significant day, a day that never had to happen,” Kerry said to Al Gore, the former US vice-president, in a conversation filmed on the eve of the re-entry. “It’s so sad that our previous president without any scientific basis or any legitimate economic rationale decided to pull America out. It hurt us and it hurt the world.”

Updated

Here’s more on the disaster declaration Joe Biden plans to sign from The Wall Street Journal’s Ken Thomas:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency made generators and fuel available to support critical infrastructure sites, after Mr. Biden approved an emergency declaration for all 254 counties in the state. As of Friday morning, FEMA had also distributed 729,000 liters of water, more than 10,000 wool blankets and 50,000 cotton blankets, and 225,000 meals in Fort Worth, Texas.

Mr. Biden spoke Thursday night with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and said his administration was ready to provide additional federal disaster support, which would help pay for physical damage from the storm that left hundreds of thousands of people without power and caused water disruptions for millions of Texans. Mr. Abbott requested the major disaster assistance Thursday.

The president told reporters Friday that he planned to speak to the Federal Emergency Management Agency later in the day “to ask them to accelerate the response to the request for a major disaster declaration so we can get everything done they need.”

The declaration, once approved, would allow communities in Texas to seek federal assistance to pay for damages to infrastructure as well as state residents to help them pay for property damage.

Mr. Biden said he was directing several federal agencies, including U.S. Housing and Urban Development and the Defense Department, “to identify other resources we can provide to assist the growing needs of the folks in Texas.”

The White House on Friday released a list of Texas elected officials that it had been coordinating with “to understand the dire situation on the ground” and ensure they were in touch with FEMA and other federal resources.

The list included several mayors, including those of Houston, San Antonio and Austin, along with leaders of the state’s largest counties.

Biden ready to declare major disaster in Texas after deadly winter storm

Joe Biden said Friday he was ready to declare a major disaster in Texas after a deadly winter storm cut power and disrupted water supplies for millions across the state.

Biden said the declaration, which follows a request from Texas governor Greg Abbott, could be signed as soon as this afternoon, and would open up broader federal aid for immediate and long-term recovery efforts.

Biden also said he would travel to the state as long as he was not a burden to local authorities.

“As I said when I ran, I’m going to be a president for all Americans,” said Biden, who won November’s election without winning Texas.

“If I can do it without creating a burden for folks, I plan on going,” he said of the visit, which could take place next week.

Biden is expected to have a call with the acting administrator at the federal emergency management agency (FEMA) later on Friday.

Biden assures US allies he will reverse Trump's legacy

Joe Biden made his virtual debut as president on the world stage on Friday, pledging “unshakeable” US support for the transatlantic alliance in what he portrayed as an epoch-defining struggle to safeguard democracy.

In videoconference remarks first to the G7 and then the Munich Security Conference, Biden sought to assure America’s allies of his determination to bury the legacy left by his predecessor.

Donald Trump was not mentioned but almost every sentence of Biden’s speech to the Munich conference was framed by how the new US president would reverse the policies and approach of the past four years.

In the wake of the January insurrection in Washington in which Trump’s supporters had attempted to overturn the result of the US election by force, Biden said neither he nor Europe’s leaders could take democracy for granted.

“In so many places, including Europe and the United States, democratic progress is under assault,” Biden said. “Historians are going to examine and write about this moment as an inflection point and I believe with every ounce of my being that democracy will and must prevail.”

“That, in my view, is our galvanizing mission,” the president said, in a livestreamed speech to Munich, where he shared the virtual stage with Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron. “Democracy doesn’t happen by accident. We have to defend it, fight for it, strengthen it, renew it.”

My colleague Sam Levine has written a piece on sweeping new legislation unveiled by Georgia Republicans that would make it dramatically harder to vote in the state.

The move follows November’s elections which had record turnout and surging participation among Black voters.

He reports:

The measure is one of the most brazen efforts to make it harder to vote in America in recent years. The bill would block officials from offering early voting on Sundays, a day traditionally used by Black churches to mobilize voters as part of a “souls to the polls” effort. It would place new limits on the use of mail-in ballot dropboxes, restrict who can handle an absentee ballot, and require voters to provide their driver’s license number or a copy of other identification with their application for a mail-in ballot. It would also require voters to provide the same driver’s license information on the mail-in ballot itself or the last four digits of their social security number if they do not have an acceptable ID.

Read Sam’s full report here:

Today so far

  • The winter storms in Texas are also affecting vaccine distribution.
  • Congressional Republicans are being directed to oppose Democrats’ Covid relief package.
  • President Joe Biden is promising to use federal resources to help Texas. He also responded to a question on whether he would visit the state by saying “yes” but adding he didn’t want to be a burden.
  • Biden also reaffirmed the United States’ commitment to Nato.

Updated

How the winter storms robbed Texas of a week of vaccine distribution

Shipment delays and vaccination site closures triggered by the catastrophic winter storm have essentially robbed Texas of an entire week in the race to protect Americans against Covid-19, even as widespread power outages, water shortages and lack of food cause yet another humanitarian crisis in the state.

“Everything was put on ice — literally — this week,” said Chris Van Deusen, director of media relations at the Texas Department of State Health Services.

Shipping hubs also affected by the winter weather generally didn’t risk transporting most of the precious vaccine doses for jabs in Texas amid the storm. Exceptions included 125,000 Moderna vaccines that arrived at hub providers last Friday and a handful of Pfizer doses that were supposed to make it by Wednesday, though some sites hadn’t received them on time, Van Deusen said.

But “even if it takes a day or two to get them delivered as conditions improve, it’s not gonna put the vaccine in jeopardy,” he added.

If vaccine providers have doses that are going to spoil and can’t be stored safely, they’re up for grabs to anyone who’s willing to take them, regardless of whether that person meets Texas’ current eligibility criteria prioritizing healthcare workers, long-term care residents, the elderly and people with pre-existing conditions.

But other than a storage facility in Houston’s Harris county, where power went out, a backup generator failed, and thousands of doses were quickly redistributed to a university, the county jail, and local hospitals, Van Deusen hasn’t heard of too many desperate scrambles to reallocate shots before they expire.

Both vaccines — and especially Moderna’s — have enough of a shelf life to weather the storm if they’re able to be stored correctly.

“We haven’t fortunately gotten a whole lot of reports, at least to this point, of vaccine being spoiled,” Van Deusen said. “But, you know, people may just now be getting back into places, or over the next few days.”

Icy, slick roads have caused treacherous driving conditions across Texas, making it incredibly dangerous for people to grab much-needed groceries or get to hotels and warming centers, much less attend their clinical appointments. Likewise, as the natural disaster and subsequent failure of basic infrastructure have wreaked havoc on the state, vaccination sites have shuttered for days.

Around 10.6% of Texans have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine and 4.3% have received both doses, according to the New York Times, lagging behind the nation at large.

Since the start of the pandemic, more than 2.2 million confirmed Covid-19 infections and roughly 340,000 probable cases have ravaged the state, killing almost 41,000 residents so far.

Updated

Over on Capitol Hill, Republican members of Congress are being advised by their leadership to oppose Democrats’ Covid rescue package.

I’ve touched on this in my recent reporting. Despite Joe Biden’s interest in lowering the temperature in the national political discourse and offering a sincere olive branch to Republicans on policymaking it’s looking increasingly like both Republicans and Democrats are going to dig in on their respective sides. Democrats will use their (slim) majorities to push through a Covid relief bill and Republicans will oppose it very likely along party lines.

It’s the way things are in Washington these days.

Meanwhile there’s a bunch of news coming out of a Covid-19 response team briefing. New vaccination sites are being set up. Dr Anthony Fauci has also cautioned about the availability of data for vaccines for children until early next year.

A mix of top notch healthcare reporters and political reporters are covering this.

Updated

Biden promises to use federal resources to help Texas

Notably, Joe Biden is also promising to use the force of the federal government to help Texas.

Updated

And again, this speech is making clear that this is indeed a different president with a different foreign policy worldview. Joe Biden in his speech has reaffirmed the United States’ commitment to Nato and warned about Russia.

Updated

The tonal shift in Biden’s address here and that of Donald Trump when he was president is very apparent.

The US has officially rejoined the Paris climate agreement today, 107 days after it exited the global effort to stave off disastrous global heating at the behest of Donald Trump. Joe Biden moved to reverse the withdrawal on his first day in the White House.

In an online event to mark the re-entry, John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, said he was “super excited” and admitted that “for the last four years there were a lot of times when a lot of us thought the failure of this enterprise may rest on one word – Trump.”

The world is still committed to action on the climate crisis, Kerry said, although far more needs to be done to avert catastrophic flooding, heatwaves and other disasters. “Paris is not enough,” said the former US secretary of state.

Crucial UN climate talks will be held in Scotland later this year and the Biden administration is starting to cajole other countries, including the fossil fuel-friendly leaderships of Brazil and Australia, to accelerate emissions cuts. Last night Kerry told Al Gore, the former US vice president, that the talks present the “last, best hope” to avoid climate breakdown.

Switching gears, Joe Biden is delivering his address to the Munich Security Conference. You can watch below:

Underscoring how unprepared the state was for a storm like this, the Dallas Morning News reports that the CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas warned that the state’s power grid was “seconds or minutes” away from collapsing.

Here’s the dispatch:

Texas’ electrical system was “seconds or minutes” from collapsing and plunging the state into the dark for months, the power grid’s operators said Thursday while defending their decision to initiate controlled outages.

“Our frequency went to a level that, if operators had not acted very rapidly … it could have very quickly changed,” said Bill Magness, CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the agency that oversees the grid.

Starting about 11 p.m. Sunday, generation units started knocking off “in rapid succession,” Magness said. Several big units could have gone offline by the minute if officials had waited.

He said controlled outages were the only real choice because a true blackout would leave the entire state without power for an indefinite amount of time — possibly months.

But Gov. Greg Abbott had harsh words for ERCOT during a news conference Thursday afternoon. In calling for reforms, he said that what happened in Texas “can never be replicated again.”

Communities throughout Texas are having to provide their own response to the snow storms and resource crises throughout Texas. Andrew Lapin in The Jewish Telegraphic Agency lays out how Jewish communities are responding throughout the state:

Jewish communities, like others across the state, are taking steps to address their own needs. In Dallas, one of the region’s two Jewish senior living centers lost both its main power and backup generator, forcing the staff to quickly relocate residents to the area’s other senior center — fortunately it had spare room, having just recently opened.

Two Orthodox Jewish-run emergency response units, Hatzalah of Dallas and the newly formed Texas Chaverim, both founded by a local resident, Baruch Shawel, sent out patrols to assist residents with dead car batteries, medical emergencies and other issues.

“It’s been pretty wild out here,” Hannah Lebovits, a professor at the University of Texas-Arlington who lives in an Orthodox community in north Dallas, said of the rolling blackouts, which accompany other problems like loss of heat and water pressure. “Thankfully in the Jewish community, very often we quickly create our own mutual aid systems.”

Still, Lebovits said, “It shouldn’t be Chaverim doing that. It should be the city of Dallas knocking on my door and checking on me.”

In Houston, too, Jewish leaders are leaning on coordination groundwork laid long before the unusual cold snap set in. Traumatized by the patchwork Jewish response to Hurricane Harvey’s devastating floods, the Jewish Federation of Greater Houston had convened the Jewish Response and Action Network in early 2020, even before the pandemic.

“After Harvey, each shul made its own response. They made their own food. It wasn’t coordinated,” said Jackie Fisherman, the network’s director and the Houston federation’s director of government affairs. “We thought there must be a better way.”

More here.

My colleague Nina Lakhani lays out how Texas is facing dwindling food supplies amid the ongoing storms and power problems:

Food banks in Texas have gone into disaster mode as they ramp up operations to tackle a surge in hunger after unprecedented freezing conditions disrupted almost every part of the food supply chain in the state.

Grocery stores are empty, school meal programs suspended, and deliveries disrupted by untreated, treacherous roads that have left millions of Texans trapped in precarious living conditions with dwindling food supplies.

Even those who did stockpile before the Arctic conditions swept in have lost refrigerated groceries due to lengthy power cuts and cannot cook what food they do have without electricity or gas.

If you’ve ever wondered what it was like to serve Donald Trump at the Trump hotel, Jessica Sidman at Washingtonian magazine has answers. Sidman got her hands on a “Standard Operating Procedure” document for serving the now-former president:

As soon as Trump was seated, the server had to “discreetly present” a mini bottle of Purell hand sanitizer. (This applied long before Covid, mind you.) Next, cue dialogue: “Good (time of day) Mr. President. Would you like your Diet Coke with or without ice?” the server was instructed to recite. A polished tray with chilled bottles and highball glasses was already prepared for either response. Directions for pouring the soda were detailed in a process no fewer than seven steps long—and illustrated with four photo exhibits. The beverage had to be opened in front of the germophobe commander in chief, “never beforehand.” The server was to hold a longneck-bottle opener by the lower third of the handle in one hand and the Diet Coke, also by the lower third, in the other. Once poured, the drink had to be placed at the President’s right-hand side. “Repeat until POTUS departs.”

The Trump children were easier, Sidman writes:

By contrast, Trump’s children were fairly low-key and polite. (The most salacious detail any former staff offered about Ivanka is that one time she showed up in yoga pants and indulged in a single margarita.) “They just came in, did their thing, and left,” says former assistant general manager Alyssa O’Clock. “Ivanka would sit with her back to the rest of the dining room. She didn’t really want to be seen there, necessarily.”

It’s hard not to at least pay a little attention o the fallout of senator Ted Cruz of Texas’s poorly timed escape to Cancun. Plenty of backlash is pouring out online. As The Washington Post’s Ashley Parker noted, Cruz has gained new nicknames:

But his brief tropical sojourn yielded at least two unflattering nicknames on social media — Cancun Cruz and Flyin’ Ted — and prompted a Twitter-fueled news cycle that seemed to unite a broken nation.

[...]

Cancun-gate checked nearly every possible box of a scandal. The sad-sack black roller suitcase and oversize canvas tote, awaiting its beach debut! The fleece half-zip as part of the classic frumpy Dad ensemble! The 6 a.m. scramble to book a return flight! The politician seeming to blame his preteen daughters! The adorable family dog, possibly left home alone! The police escort! The leaked text messages, with a “Real Housewives of Houston” mood!

Cruz hasn’t tweeted in about 11 hours and the last tweet he published was him promising to fight to restore power back to Texas.

Updated

The Texas Tribune has a must-read story this morning on how Black and Hispanic communities are suffering through the storm. Here’s are the key lines:

Low-income Texans of color bore some of the heaviest weight of the power outages as the inequities drawn into the state’s urban centers were exacerbated in crisis. And already more impacted by unemployment and devastation of the pandemic, their troubles won’t end after the storm clears and the heat is running again in their homes.

As temperatures dropped into single digits in Austin, electricity was kept on in neighborhoods sharing circuits with critical facilities like hospitals — facilities less commonly found in poor communities or those whose residents are predominantly Black and Hispanic.

[...]

Local leaders, particularly those representing mostly Black and Hispanic communities, pointed out that neighborhoods with mostly Black and Hispanic residents tend to have older homes with bad insulation, leaking roofs and older pipes that make them less likely to withstand extreme weather. In the case of Almendarez, this has led to power bills of up to $500 during the summer.

With the state’s food supply chain also buckling under the storm’s strain, those local leaders are worried about the fallout for areas that lack grocery stores and pharmacies. Plummer said during the storm, the few store shelves in those neighborhoods emptied fast and older people had trouble finding medication.

Ted Cruz facces backlash over Cancún trip as millions face power shortages

Hello from Washington and happy Friday.

Daniel Strauss here. All eyes in the US are on Texas, which is still suffering power and resource shortages. Across the state, millions of Texans are without heat, safe drinking water and power as winter storms ravage the state.

Meanwhile, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas is still facing backlash over traveling to Cancún with his family to escape the weather.

Last night, news outlets began to report out a text chain that Heidi Cruz, the senator’s wife, was on showing how she was looking to spearhead the trip to Cancún with her family.

Here’s the write-up from The New York Times:

Text messages sent from Ms. Cruz to friends and Houston neighbors on Wednesday revealed a hastily planned trip. Their house was “FREEZING,” as Ms. Cruz put it — and she proposed a getaway until Sunday. Ms. Cruz invited others to join them at the Ritz-Carlton in Cancún, where they had stayed “many times,” noting the room price this week ($309 per night) and its good security. The text messages were provided to The New York Times and confirmed by a second person on the thread, who declined to be identified because of the private nature of the texts.

For what it’s worth, governor Greg Abbott of Texas digressed when asked about the senator’s trip.

“I haven’t been following people’s vacation plans,” Abbott said at a press conference. “We’ve been working literally all night since we talked to you guys yesterday. And today – I don’t know about people’s travel plans.”

Abbott also has called on lawmakers in the state to order power plants to be better prepared for weather emergencies.

Updated

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