Greg Abbott's self-loathing demonstrated in his ADA litigation

Attorney General Greg Abbott, who has said he supports the Americans with Disabilities Act, has tenaciously battled to block the courthouse door to disabled Texans who sue the state.

In a series of legal cases in his three terms, Abbott’s office has fought a blind pharmacy professor in Amarillo who wanted reflective tape on the stairs to her office; two deaf defendants in Laredo who asked for a qualified sign language interpreter in their courtroom; and a woman with an amputated leg. In that case, the state argued she was not disabled because she had a prosthetic limb.

Abbott, who has used a wheelchair since a tree fell on him while he was jogging and crushed his spine almost 30 years ago, applauds the 1990 federal law. It has helped provide the ramps, wide doors and access that allow him to give speeches and meet with constituents.

Unspeakable, isn't it?  In his defense, Abbott says he's just doing his job.

While Abbott, the leading Republican contender for governor, benefits from the ADA mandates that guide businesses, builders and cities, he believes it is unconstitutional to force the state to comply. He has argued that his duty is to protect the state’s autonomy and its taxpayers by using all legal tools available to him — including the argument that the state is immune from disability lawsuits brought under the ADA.

“It’s the attorney general’s duty to zealously represent the interests of the state of Texas, and in these cases that meant raising all applicable legal arguments in litigation where Texas was sued in court,” said Abbott spokesman Jerry Strickland.

I'm sure he thought he was just doing his job when he advocated for tort reform, in order to deny all future Texans the legal bootstraps that he pulled himself up by after he ran under that tree.

Advocates for the disabled say Abbott’s office has worked to deny ADA protections by repeatedly and falsely claiming that impaired Texans don’t have the right to sue the state for discrimination. Abbott declined several requests from The Dallas Morning News to discuss the matter.

It touches on two key elements of Abbott’s campaign to succeed Gov. Rick Perry. He is touting his record of defending conservative legal principles. But Abbott also is highlighting his disability as evidence of his toughness. In campaign speeches and videos, he notes that he has “literally, a spine of steel” as a result of the accident.

There's a difference between being tough and being mean, just as there is a difference between a spine of steel and a titanium spinal implant.  'Tough' isn't the proper word to describe Abbott; 'cruel' is.  One example.

For former Texas Tech University Health Sciences professor Elaine King Miller, who was suffering a degenerative eye disease, the question was whether the university would provide her, among other things, reflective tape on the stairway and voice-recognition software for typing on her computer.

It took a five-year legal fight with the state. In 2005, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals cleared the way for her to pursue a discrimination suit.

Another example.

...In 2004, it argued before the Texas Supreme Court that a woman with one leg could not claim disability discrimination because she wore a prosthesis that remedied her mobility.

The all-Republican court rejected the argument, issuing a unanimous, written opinion just three weeks later. The court usually considers cases for months, even years.

The most bizarre disclosure in the article is that Abbott frequently loses his requests to have the cases dismissed on sovereign immunity... but frequently wins them when they go to trial.

You would think any sensible barrister would eventually come to the conclusion that he could just let the cases be tried on their merits.  Not Greg Abbott.  Besides being a lousy lawyer and a sorry individual, and like most people who at some basic level are both stupid and cruel... he's stubborn.

Dennis Borel, executive director of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities, said that advocates’ frustration stems from Abbott’s office consistently seeking immunity for Texas agencies, regardless of the claim.

“When you invoke the sovereign immunity defense, you’re not responding to the merits of the case,” he said. “You’re simply saying the state is immune for its violations of the ADA and therefore there’s not even a point of having a day in court.”

Brian East, senior attorney for Texas Disability Rights, said the repeated efforts to raise sovereign immunity against the disabled cuts off the chance to fix problems.

“I wouldn’t say they were hostile,” East said of the attorney general’s legal team. “They are hostile to the notion that individual citizens might have redress against the state, in general. They are not targeting people with disabilities specifically, but doing what they can to limit the rights of individuals to use the courts in civil rights cases against the state.”

It's really difficult to understand how Greg Abbott -- as a man, as a human being with a semblance of conscience -- is able to live with himself.  There's simply no amount of psychological counseling, or prayer, or whatever you want to call it that can resolve these inner conflicts.  It just winds up manifesting itself as some kind of internal and/or external rage and hatred.

The man is so reprehensible that people with a functioning soul can't comprehend his motivations.  Which naturally excludes the vast majority of Texas Republican primary voters.

Abbott's ego and self-importance -- I'm sure he just thinks of it as his destiny -- has completely consumed his conscience.  That minor annoyance was sacrificed on the altar of his political aspirations many years ago.   And yet he is surrounded by sycophants who believe he is honorable, decent, "God-fearing", and every manner of similarly happy horseshit.

This is the deepest, most disturbed, most profound cognitive dissonance on public display I can say I have ever witnessed.  It's hard to predict how truly hideous a governor Greg Abbott is capable of being in the wake of fourteen years of Rick Perry, but Texans are very likely to find out.

Unless something really unforeseen happens, that is.

Sunday Funnies

Fox covers up Corker's tactics in celebrating UAW loss

Millions of Texas voters, mostly Ds, are MIA

Ross Ramsey, talking about things some people are painfully aware of.

The biggest chunk of the state’s growth can be attributed to an increase in the minority populations, and the biggest part of that growth has been Hispanic. And that is where the hype about politics revs up: To the extent that they vote, minorities in Texas tend to vote for Democrats more than Republicans. If the number of minorities rise along with the population, and if those new voters behave like their voting counterparts, then the electorate should grow to favor the Democrats.

That was the idea behind the Democrats’ “dream team” ticket in 2002, which included a couple of big-city mayors, Ron Kirk and Kirk Watson; a wealthy Hispanic oilman, Tony Sanchez Jr.; and a mix of proven veterans and promising prospects. It didn’t work, but there were some hopeful years, when Democrats in the Legislature made gains.

Then the 2008 presidential race arrived. The Democratic primary that year had 2,874,986 Texas voters. Most of the time, presidential contests are all but settled by the time the campaigns reach Texas. But in 2008, neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton had clinched the nomination, and their battle over Texas lifted turnout considerably. The excitement over a contested national race even helped increase Republican turnout that year.

The Republicans held their numbers, turning out about the same number of voters in each of the two primaries that followed, but many of the Democratic primary voters who came out in 2008 never returned. In 2010, only 680,548 Texans voted in the Democratic primary. Two years after that, only 590,164 voted. In general elections, their top-line numbers also fell. Obama received 43.7 percent of the overall vote in the 2008 general election. Former Mayor Bill White of Houston got 42.3 percent in 2010 in a race for governor, and Paul Sadler lost the U.S. Senate election to Ted Cruz with 40.6 percent.

The population may be booming, but the electorate is not, and the Democratic electorate got smaller.

These figures have been previously identified; there is a large number of Texans who are citizens and are of voting age -- between 2.5 and 3 million -- that are not registered to vote.  Those are the prime targets for Battleground Texas.

But there are some eight million Texans registered to vote who did not do so in 2012.  They might not all be Democrats, but you can rest assured that a large majority of them are.  And that is precisely where the turning of Texas to a purplish shade of blue rests.

Republicans are confident their firewall can prevent that from happening.  Between the biweekly stoking of Tea Party outrage to the efforts, legal and extralegal, to keep potential Democratic voters from doing so (photo ID requirements and thug tactics practiced by the King Street Patriot/True the Vote pale mafia), the job lies with the Texas Democratic Party, their candidates, activists, and assorted supporters to make the case for change.  To persuade those millions of Texans who have no habit of regularly performing their civic function -- of participating in the selection of the leaders of the state -- into those that do.  Here's some Census statistics from a worthwhile article by Patti Hart, in the Chron...

46.3 percent of Texans earning more than $75,000 voted in 2010, compared to 26.7 percent of those earning less than $35,000 

52.4 percent of Texans with college degrees voted, compared to 22.8 percent with less than a high school diploma 

16 percent of Texans under 30 voted, while 42.7 percent of the over-30 crowd participated 

43.8 percent of white Texans voted in 2010, compared with 38.7% of African Americans and 23.1% of Hispanics

That task makes turning a battleship around look like a walk in the park.  Back to Ramsey...

The Republicans have more money, and their steady, habitual turnout has given them a list of stalwarts who vote no matter what. The Democrats have a list of stalwarts, too, but it is considerably smaller.

So they are looking for first-timers, people who haven’t voted before because they just moved here or just recently came of age or haven’t been involved in elections before and are just waiting for someone to ask them.

And there is the other group, the 2.2 million Texans who turned out in March 2008 and haven’t been seen in a primary location since then. The Democrats already have their names, if not their votes.

GOTV is a door to door, block to block effort.  Turning out one's precinct means visiting your neighbor, calling them on the phone, or mailing them a postcard.  We'll get a glimpse, beginning next week as early voting for the March primaries gets under way, as to whether Battleground Texas' initial efforts are bearing some fruit.

Eye on Williamson has more detail, and links to other analysis.