On March 2, Governor Greg Abbott entered a Mexican restaurant in Lubbock wearing a black cloth mask. As he waited to be introduced, Abbott adjusted the ear loops and gave a small tug on the fabric covering his mouth. A moment later, perhaps remembering what he was there to do, he took his mask off. The Virgin of Guadalupe looked at him from a painting that hung over his shoulder.
“Personal vigilance to follow the safe standards is still needed to contain COVID. It’s just that now state mandates are no longer needed,” Abbott said. Vaccines had begun to roll out, and hospitalization rates in the state had fallen by more than half since a peak of 14,000 patients in January. So Abbott announced that he was lifting the statewide mask mandate and all remaining public health restrictions on Texas businesses.
In the wake of his announcement, Abbott’s decision was widely condemned by public health experts across the country, who pointed out that more than 90 percent of Texans still hadn’t been fully vaccinated and that new variants were spreading across the state. The governor’s order allowed local officials to enact their own restrictions if COVID-19 hospitalization rates exceeded 15 percent, but with toothless enforcement, those powers were effectively useless.
“It’s bullshit,” Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff said in a TV news interview. “He didn’t give us any authority to really do anything right. He just comes along and says, ‘Well, you can’t have a penalty for failure to wear a face mask. You can’t mandate customers or employees to wear one.’ It’s meaningless.”
With cheers and applause from the governor’s supporters, who were packed in the small, family-owned Mexican restaurant on the northern edge of Lubbock, the era of pandemic mandates in Texas ended. But Abbott’s prolonged reign of expansive executive power had not. On July 29, Abbott issued another order, which stripped local authorities of their remaining power to impose restrictions when hospitalizations surge. His 30th executive order related to the pandemic came hours after the state’s health agency announced a foreboding uptick in COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths as the Delta variant spread.
In recent months, Abbott has issued orders that prohibit government entities and private businesses from requiring vaccines and local authorities from mandating masks.
Many local school districts, cities, and counties—and more recently, some major corporations—have ignored the governor’s direction and mandated masks and vaccines anyway. This widespread refusal to comply with the order sparked a critical legal fight and raised important questions about how far the governor can take his disaster authority. Can those powers be used to explicitly undermine the effectiveness of public health practices? Does a governor’s disaster powers inherently trump
