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Ted Cruz recently told Fox News that the mainstream media was trying to root for disaster. Both senators have just been named to a White House task force to open the economy, which makes me feel not one iota safer.

My particular favorite, though, is Ron Paul, the former congressman from Texas who published a very long column on March 16 on the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity website headlined The Coronavirus Hoax. There just werent enough people with the disease to warrant the incursion into our civil liberties, he warned. That was just about a week before his son, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, came down with the faux virus himself.

I will say in defense of my state that none of these people are stupid; they arent the stereotypical yahoos that so many non-Texans like to imagine live among us in droves. No. They represent the stubborn if expediently applied strain of anti-government independence that is inherent in the Texas character, which conveniently dovetails with being a Trump toady.

Mr. Abbotts fealty to the president, along with that of our senators, could mean that Texans could become the public health guinea pigs who will suffer mightily if the state opens too soon.

What all this behavior will mean in a state that is slowly turning purple is anyones guess. We are lucky that, thanks to local stay-in-place orders and a comparative lack of density in our cities, the number of Texas cases is only over 16,000, with deaths at over 390. But we are not at peak, experts tell us, and meanwhile over one million Texans have filed for unemployment. Thats a number that will cause a lot of restiveness here, and maybe some reflection on just how much actual leadership Republican leaders have displayed during this awful time.

Not that leadership hasnt been on display in other quarters. Some of the slack has been taken up by the private sector, with restaurant and small-business owners banding together to help their colleagues and trying their best to fill in for a government that is M.I.A.

The big businesses have gotten into the act, too, in particular HEB, a San Antonio-based grocery store chain that has become a lifesaver during the kinds of climate emergencies that have become the new normal here (see: Hurricane Harvey, 2017). As my colleagues Dan Solomon and Paula Forbes reported recently in Texas Monthly, HEB has had a pandemic and influenza plan since 2005, when it first took note of the H5N1 threat. The chain put that plan in effect in 2009 when the H1N1 swine flu hit.

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Texas Republicans Have Spectacularly Failed the Coronavirus Test - The New York Times