No ruling, just a delay for a fuller hearing.
Best mugshot ever
Austin and Travis County officials can continue enforcing their mask mandates after a district judge delayed action on the Texas attorney general’s request to immediately stop the mandates.
That means city and county officials can continue to require masks until at least March 26, when District Judge Lora Livingston will hold a trial.
“People have been wearing masks for a year. I don’t know that two more weeks is going to matter one way or the other,” Livingston said during a Friday hearing, according to the Austin-American Statesman, which first reported the news.
[…]
Paxton’s lawyers pushed for an injunction hearing Friday, but Livingston said it wouldn’t be fair to give the defendants only a day to prepare, the Statesman reported. Livingston said after she hears arguments March 26, she’ll rule the same day.
Travis County Judge Andy Brown counts the two-week delay as a win. It buys the area some time to keep requiring masks while residents get vaccinated. It will also keep the mandate through most schools’ spring break holidays.
Abbott’s latest order states “no jurisdiction” can implement local restrictions, except a county judge and only when hospitalizations in a region exceed 15%.
“This case raises a pressing question: who is ultimately responsible for responding to the COVID-19 pandemic and other emergencies?” Paxton’s attorneys wrote in the lawsuit. “The Texas Disaster Act charges the Governor—not an assortment of thousands of county judges, city mayors, and local health officials—with leading the State’s response to a statewide emergency.”
But Brown and Adler argue that local public health officials maintain the authority to create orders on the local level to protect their community from pandemics. It’s different, they argued, from using emergency powers.
Brown said if the judge rules differently, it will have “huge ramifications” on local government moving forward.
Local government needs to be able to move quickly on issues of public health, he said, emphasizing that it’s “the whole point of the way our state government is set up.”
See here for the background. I certainly agree with Andy Brown about the ramifications for local governments, but it’s not like this is a surprise. Our Republican-dominated state government has been very clear about its priorities with respect to cities and (Democratic) counties. This is and will be just another example of that.
In the comments to the earlier post I was asked what would I have Austin and Travis County do about this. My deeply unsatisfying answer is that there isn’t anything they could do right now. The law and the courts are against them, and there isn’t even a symbolic win available. Paxton will prevail in court, very likely in swift fashion, and he’ll gloat about it. The only thing that can be done is to work extra hard to elect a better state government in 2022. Nothing will change until that happens. Believe me, I wish there were a better answer.
THE ROT AT THE TOP
There is something rotten in the State … and the State ain’t Denmark, you-all
Think about it for a moment: Abbott once again invoked the Texas Disaster Act, a statute that gives him the power to unilaterally issue emergency orders to *fight* an epidemic, and uses that power to *thwart and outlaw* local governments’ initiatives to *fight* the epidemic.
We are one step closer to Orwellian conditions, to mix literary references: What we have here is public policy that is positively perverse: use of emergency disease-control powers to promote virus spread.
Another sequel in the series: “Slouching Towards Nineteen Eighty-Four: Modern Republicanism and Intellectual Bankruptcy.”
“In the comments to the earlier post I was asked what would I have Austin and Travis County do about this. My deeply unsatisfying answer is that there isn’t anything they could do right now. The law and the courts are against them, and there isn’t even a symbolic win available. ”
but they just bought themselves two weeks, maybe more (if the lower court rules for them, then the mask mandate continues until the appeal) of giving cover to local businesses and protecting local workers (and consumers). far from there not being a plan, as you keep suggesting, that WAS the plan, as stated by Adler. in two weeks, the number of people vaccinated (and thus kept safer in the meantime) could be as much as doubled.
so the plan is working. not sure why this is so hard to grasp.