AUSTIN, Texas – For Republicans who have run the Texas state government for years, trying to undermine the Democrats who lead the state’s largest cities has been a bloody sport for years. They tried to ignore local authorities in disputes involving everything from restrictions on the pandemic and bans on plastic bags to protection for immigrants.
But this week, the collapse of the state’s power grid gave Democrats a chance to turn the tide. With the state suffering from a rare winter storm that caused widespread power cuts, Democrats mobilized public anger over the oversight of Republicans in the energy industry, opening up a new front in their battle to erode party dominance in all offices. state and in both chambers of the legislature.
While Democrats have made major inroads in recent election cycles, Texas Republicans have avoided the kind of revolutionary gains that have rocked states like Arizona and Georgia.
“Those in the legislature and those in the executive branch of government have spent a lot of time trying to run cities and counties and not enough on state issues,” said Sylvester Turner, Democratic mayor of Houston, the largest city in Texas and the fourth largest in the country. “And now he is coming back to bite you. Before trying to manage my home, you need to make sure that you are managing your own. “
These assessments come at a time when Greg Abbott, the Republican governor, was already under attack for his way of dealing with the pandemic. Even before the thawing of the freezers forced health officials in Houston to work hard this week to administer thousands of doses of vaccine, Latin leaders in southern Texas were already begging Abbott to allow city officials across the border to implement stricter mitigation measures.
At the same time, a series of other scandals has focused scrutiny on Republicans who hold power at the state level in Texas. Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, remains under a cloud of legal problems as he responds to allegations of abuse of power, including a lawsuit by former advisers who say he has taken bribes from a real estate developer.
The Texas Legislature, dominated by Republicans, is also intriguing. In one episode, a secret audio recording in 2019 by a conservative activist showed Dennis Bonnen, the former Texas mayor, conspiring against other Republicans in trying to get support from hardline activists to overthrow them in primary challenges.
As attention turns to the electricity crisis, Turner, the mayor of Houston, is among Democrats who have been warning for years that the state’s power grid is at risk of failure.
After a 2011 disaster in which a rare winter storm interrupted power supplies across the state, Turner, then a state deputy, warned the following year that state regulators were giving utilities plenty of leeway. Other Democrats across the state are now calling for radical changes in state industry oversight.
“Many areas in Texas probably already looked like they were in an emergency before the blackout – Covid case numbers, peak hospital numbers and the vaccine mess,” said Ana Sandoval, a Democrat and member of the San Antonio City Council. “State leaders need to take the sale off and realize that energy is not just about savings. It is a matter of life and death. “
Some Republicans are adhering to calls for greater responsibility. Governor Abbott declared the reform of the Texas Electric Reliability Council, which operates the state’s electrical grid, an emergency item for the Legislative Assembly. Representative Dade Phelan, the mayor of Texas, convened hearings to examine the factors that contributed to the network’s collapse.
“People are suffering now because we failed,” said state deputy Tony Tinderholt, a retired military officer who is considered one of the most conservative members of the House. Like millions of other Texans, Mr. Tinderholt, his wife and two young children were left without power at their home in Arlington and took refuge in a hotel.
“And when I say ‘we’, I’m talking about the Legislature, ERCOT and the energy companies,” said Tinderholt.
Much of the rest of the United States has interconnected electrical systems, but Texas has long stood out for having its own network. Although the system was praised by hardline conservatives as an example of the state’s courage to act alone, the unusual configuration originated when Democrats who previously exercised control over Texas policy sought to protect companies in the state from federal regulators who supervised the interstate sale of electricity.
Republicans who came to power in Texas in the 1990s had their own ideas about boosting the electricity industry. At that time, Texas energy giants like Enron (before its spectacular collapse in an accounting scandal in 2001) were gaining applause for aggressive moves in the energy markets in the United States and around the world.
George W. Bush, while governor of Texas before he became president, reformed the Texas electricity market in 1999 with a proposal to increase competition in parts of the sector. But energy experts say state regulators appointed by Republican governors in power for decades in Texas are reluctant to do anything that could raise electricity prices.
“They basically created an old-style Soviet office,” said Ed Hirs, a professor of energy savings at the University of Houston, referring to ERCOT. “This is a controlled flight to the terrain.”
Republicans have been overseeing the Texas energy industry for decades, but Abbott, along with other prominent Texas conservatives, sought to deflect responsibility by blaming the storm crisis on renewable energy sources such as wind and solar that were hampered by cold wave. In an appearance on Fox News, Mr. Abbott said that dependence on wind and solar energy “pushed Texas into a situation where power was lacking across the state.”
Still, that statement runs counter to the very role of Abbott and his Republican predecessors, like Rick Perry and Bush, in overseeing the growth of renewable energy sources in Texas. Earlier in the week, Abbott himself attributed the lack of energy in part to the freezing of natural gas transmission systems.
Wind generation in Texas, which still accounts for a relatively small fraction of the state’s electricity production, has actually exceeded projections in recent days. ERCOT officials say that limited supplies of natural gas, along with frozen instruments in natural gas, coal and nuclear facilities that make renewable energies in Texas’s electricity supply, are the main factors in the crisis.
Still, prominent Republicans like Perry, the former Texas governor and energy secretary in the Trump administration, blame renewable energy. In a blog post on the page of Congressman Kevin McCarthy, a minority leader in the United States House of Representatives, Perry sought to warn Democrats against trying to introduce greater oversight of the electricity sector.
“Texans would be without electricity for more than three days to keep the federal government out of business,” said Perry.
In addition to arguing about energy sources, Abbott, who succeeded Perry in 2014, was already on the defensive due to complaints from Democrats and even some Republicans about the insular way he nominates people for state councils and commissions. Legislation aimed at putting an end to so-called donor-paid nominations by the governor has not advanced in Republican-controlled chambers.
Mr. Abbott appointed the three commissioners of the Texas Public Utility Commission that oversees ERCOT. As for ERCOT itself, its council leader does not live in Texas, but in Michigan; its vice president is a professor who lives in California and teaches at a university in Germany.
“No one should pretend that the cause of this catastrophe is some mysterious entity that is somehow separated from the state government,” said Rep. Chris Turner, leader of the 67 Democrats in the Texas House. “This whole episode represents a catastrophic failure of leadership.”
Even so, even some Republicans who demanded answers to the electricity crisis see things differently. Kel Seliger, a former mayor of Amarillo and now a member of the Texas Senate, warned of making drastic changes.
“I don’t think they planned something that looks like catastrophe to many people,” said Seliger. “How much generation would it take and how much would it cost taxpayers to ensure that it doesn’t happen? So you have to weigh the costs in relation to how often we have this kind of thing. “
But with power cuts dragging on for days in parts of the state, Democratic leaders are openly expressing their exasperation.
“I also don’t know what that means,” Eric Johnson, the mayor of Dallas, said on Twitter in response to an ERCOT statement using jargon like “load reduction” – a term that refers to the deliberate shutdown of part of a power system to prevent a wider failure – to explain the outages. “People are suffering and need to have an idea of what to expect.”
David Montgomery reported from Austin, Simon Romero Albuquerque, and James Dobbins from San Antonio.