MSNBC host Joy Reid called Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott a “Jim Crow governor” for threatening to arrest fleeing Texas Democrats.
“And your governor is acting like a Jim crow governor threatening to arrest y’all when you get back,” Reid began. During a Monday night interview with Laura Ingraham, Abbott vowed to arrest the Democrats, who fled to Washington, D.C. in order to avoid voting on the Republicans’ election reform bill, upon their return to Texas. Abbott said the lawmakers would be brought to the Texas Capitol in order to finish conducting business.
Reid then claimed that the voters who elected President Joe Biden are the ones being attacked and asked if Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Krystin Sinema, who are opposed to abolishing the filibuster, would “force the president of the United States to break faith with the voters who got him in.”
Xochitl Hinojosa, former Department of Justice (DOJ) spokesperson on voting rights, said that “Biden is committed to ensuring that something happens.” (RELATED: Texas Dems Break Into Song During Press Conference In DC)
“If we continue to see that there is no action, then I do think that you will eventually see the White House put their political muscle around this to end a legislative procedure that makes no sense right now when it comes to voting rights, right, that’s standing in the way,” Hinojosa added.
The former DOJ spokesperson then claimed that Republicans’ new election laws are only happening because they don’t want ballots mailed to minorities.
“I think one of thing that’s also lost in the messaging right now is that Republicans in Texas, the indicted attorney general in Texas actually admitted that the whole reason why this was happening is because, in places like in Harris County in Houston, Texas, one of the largest counties in Texas, they would have mailed applications to African-American and Latino voters that they would have lost the election in Texas,” she alleged.
