Abbott told Loesch shooting migrants would be murder. What about letting them drown?

“The only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because of course the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”

- Texas Gov. Greg Abbott That’s our governor talking, folks. Yessir, he’s one tough son of a gun. Or, at least, he sounds like one. We would suggest, though, that he’s not tough at all. We would suggest that he’s a coward, not to mention an ongoing embarrassment to this state.

Despite his big talk, it is a small man who leaches power and satisfaction from the mistreatment and mockery of the vulnerable. It is a small man who refuses to consider the dangerousness of his tough talk and his callous policies. While clumsily evoking the murder of migrants could incite another El Paso massacre, his rogue, unrelenting policing of the border is endangering lives.

Indeed, on Saturday, U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, announced that the bodies of three migrants — a woman and two children — were found floating in the Rio Grande near an Eagle Pass park that Texas DPS troopers have seized. Cuellar said Texas authorities wouldn’t grant access to U.S. Border Patrol agents trying to respond to migrants in distress and agreed only to send a soldier to assess the situation.

“This is a tragedy, and the state bears responsibility,” Cuellar said in a statement.

If Abbott fears the criminal penalty for shooting migrants, does he fear any kind of consequences for letting them drown?

Abbott’s asinine “shooting” remark came during a Jan. 5 interview with the popular right-wing talkshow provocateur Dana Loesch, and has drawn wide outrage after it was recirculated Thursday by a Chicago-based progressive radio station.

Loesch had asked the governor about the “maximum amount of pressure” he could implement to “protect the border” without crossing a legal line.

Abbott was ready with a Texas-tough answer: “We are deploying every tool and strategy that we possibly can. The only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because, of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”

The interview was aired again on Thursday, minus the line about shooting migrants. Abbott responded to the uproar over his original remarks, saying, “I explained in detail all the different things that Texas is doing that we have the legal authority to do and pointed out what would be illegal to do. It’s that simple.”

Maybe it’s not that simple. Abbott is a Texan, by God. He lives in the mythic shadow of “men with the bark on,” to borrow Frederic Remington’s memorable phrase. He’s a Texan no doubt familiar with such storied law-and-order gun handlers as Texas Rangers “Captain Jack” Hays and Mathew “Old Paint” Caldwell, Bill McDonald and Frank Hamer.

He’s a gun-loving Texan with a Lone Star reputation to uphold, especially when he’s being interviewed by the celebrity former spokesperson for the National Rifle Association. Loesch (pronounced Lash) is a former punk rocker from the Ozarks turned Lady Limbaugh talk radio star. The author of “Hands Off My Gun: Defeating the Plot to Disarm America,” she’s arguably best known for claiming that “many in legacy media love mass shootings.” She would make any gun lover feel inadequate if he couldn’t measure up to her gun-loving bellicosity.

Abbott is afraid of the NRA, despite the organization’s depleted condition these days. Presiding for nearly a decade over a state that’s invariably near the top in the number of mass shootings, he’s afraid to do anything, no matter how minor, to protect his fellow Texans in schools, churches, workplaces or entertainment venues. Ask him about Santa Fe and Sutherland Springs, El Paso and Odessa/Midland, Uvalde and Allen, and he has no answer. He quails at the prospect of Second Amendment absolutists derailing his political future.

Whatever that future happens to be, Abbott can’t ignore his party’s provocateur- in-chief and primary role model, a man who just might redefine “the maximum amount of pressure” at the border should he move back into the White House. Although Donald Trump’s incendiary language about immigrants has become de rigueur for the Republican Party, Abbott so far hasn’t repeated the former president’s Mein Kampf-style warning about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of America.

He does like to talk about an immigrant invasion, as U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, well remembers. In 2019, the day before a gunman massacred 23 people at a Walmart in her hometown, the governor’s campaign warned about the dangers of immigrant hordes invading the country. In response to Abbott’s latest remark, the congresswoman wrote in a post on X: “I can’t believe I have to say murdering people is unacceptable. It’s language like yours that left 23 people dead and 22 others injured in El Paso.”

We agree with Abbott that there’s a migrant crisis at the border. We believe Congress is largely to blame for failing again and again to fix a broken immigration system. President Biden has implemented some helpful actions, such as the “safe mobility” program that seeks to deter would-be migrants from a dangerous journey to the border by allowing them to apply to enter the U.S. as refugees, but Biden was too slow to act.

Nevertheless, Abbott’s intemperate remarks about guns and shooting people are merely of a piece with his immigration stunts – busing migrants to northern cities, stringing razor wire along the Rio Grande, arresting asylum seekers. The governor is afraid to dig in and look for real solutions to a complex problem — solutions that might mean collaborating with political opponents. When we made a similar criticism of Abbott in a recent editorial, the governor noted on X that we neglected to mention the letter he had hand-delivered to President Biden a year ago in El Paso.

That letter, antagonistic in tone and political in motive, demanded Biden get busy on border wall construction and make pandemic-era immigration policies permanent long after the pandemic ended. It wasn’t about solving anything. It was the same performative politics we’ve come to expect from a self-aggrandizing politician who’s not Texas-tough enough to do what’s right. Or even, at times, what’s human.