This week, the Supreme Court sided with federal agents to remove razor wire put in place by Texas along the Rio Grande. The state is using wire and state agents to block Border Patrol from accessing a section of the border in Eagle Pass. Homeland Security is demanding access to the area by Friday, but Gov. Greg Abbott is doubling down. Laura Barrón-López discussed the dispute with Stephen Vladeck.
Abbott’s a bigoted demogogue asshole, but this entire thing feels way overblown, thanks largely to poor reporting.
The Supreme Court ruling in question was one of those zero-commentary “shadow docket” things that simply struck down a lower court injunction holding that the federal Border Patrol was not allowed to cut razor wire laid by the Texas state guard. The clear implication is that the feds have ultimate jurisdiction and the state needs to stay in their fucking lane. But because of the ruling’s terseness, there’s wiggle room for Abbott to say that they didn’t explicitly order Texas to stop placing wire or to obstruct Border Patrol operations, only that the feds were permitted to remove it if they wanted. So he takes that legal loophole and uses it to give a big middle finger to the administration and the Court using the same hysterical rhetoric he always has.
Problem is all the reporting on the Court ruling glossed over the mechanics and interpreted it as saying more than it actually did, which in turn makes Texas’s obstinacy look less like legal trolling and more like a full-blown constitutional crisis. But Abbott has not (yet) directly disobeyed a Supreme Court order, and I expect the administration will petition the Court for an expedited slapdown of his semantic bullshit. If he ignores that, or right-wing threats pressure the Court into reversing their prior decision, then we’re really into nullification crisis territory. But the freakout roiling progressives is, at this point, premature.