Small government won’t just take a hands-off approach to regulation it’s also likely to take a more hands-off approach to assisting citizens in the case of a disaster. That’s a bold bet to make when hundreds of thousands of them still don’t have power. secretary of energy, says now that Texans are willing to endure blackouts in order to maintain the independence of their grid. Rick Perry, the former Texas governor and U.S. This is by-the-book free-market governance: The government shouldn’t make requirements, but companies will do the right thing if it serves their business interests.Īs we now know, that didn’t work. Instead, they issued voluntary guidelines to providers, and they offered financial incentives to make upgrades. But the state’s regulators didn’t want to mandate upgrades. A report warned that the state needed to harden its grid to prepare for major storms. A decade ago, another storm caused large (though smaller) failures, as the Texas Tribune explains. Texas had ample warning that this system was vulnerable. Instead, Texas has experienced staggering blackouts. If Texas had been connected to the broader national grid, the state might have been able to borrow power that would have filled the hole left when large parts of the system failed in this storm: As demand for energy for heating surged, power plants went offline, equipment froze, and wind turbines froze too. (Small, outlying parts of the state belong to the big grids.) The state maintains a separate grid to avoid having to comply with federal regulation. states are divided into two big electrical grids-except for Texas, which maintains its own independent system.
Cruz reveres the late President Ronald Reagan, who quipped, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”Ĭonsider how this works out in the case of electricity. In this worldview, the government’s role is to set a set of minimal baseline requirements, offer market-based incentives to ensure they work, and then stay the hell out of the way. Read: Blizzards and the birth of the modern mayorĬruz’s approach to politics and Texas’s approach to electrical generation flow from the same libertarian-inflected, low-regulation, small-government vision.
That’s a failure of imagination and of political ideology. It’s that he couldn’t think of any way he could use his power as a U.S. Cruz’s error is not that he was shirking a duty he knew he should have been performing. Every politician is a hypocrite at some point. It is tempting to turn the “hypocrite” label on Cruz, but his sin is worse. Complete and utter hypocrites,” Cruz wrote at the time. A Cruz tweet from December resurfaced in which he lambasted the mayor of Austin, a Democrat, for flying to Cabo San Lucas during coronavirus stay-at-home orders. The pile-on was nearly as fierce as the storm. Blaming your children is a curious tack for an embattled politician, but he doesn’t have much else to work with. In a statement, he said he took the trip at his daughters’ behest. Cruz is headed home today-if not necessarily chastened, at least eager to control the damage. More than a dozen of his constituents have already died.
He was spotted on a flight to Mexico yesterday, amid a catastrophic storm that has left Texans without power, heat, and sometimes water, huddled in freezing homes and community centers as the state’s electrical grid verges on collapse.
And although the emperor was at least ensconced in a lavish, louche palace, the senator from Texas was stuck in economy class with the peasantry.Ĭruz’s appeal as a politician, such as it is, has never been about being lovable or relatable, but the latest incident is embarrassing even by his standards. Nero fiddled while Rome burned Ted Cruz jetted to Cancún.
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