Power Up: Texas Republicans, led by Cruz, taking heat as deep freeze batters state

LONE-LY: Texas’s top Republicans are under heavy criticism for their response to the damaging deep freeze plaguing the Lone Star state, which has left at least 47 people dead, hundreds of thousands without electricity and millions without clean water.  

The GOP’s tough spot was exemplified by Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas,), who sparked a furor for packing up his family and heading to Cancun, saying his kids wanted to vacation during the cold weather. Cruz returned abruptly yesterday, admitting his trip was “obviously a mistake.”

But the other Republicans in charge in Texas are also fending off questions about their management of the state’s power grid — which doesn’t receive federal or other state help —  even as power for 2 million people has been restored.

• Gov. Greg Abbott inaccurately blamed clean energy for the power outages during a Fox News appearance. He said the crisis demonstrated why the “Green New Deal would be a deadly deal” for the country, and why “fossil fuel is necessary.” Most of the power loss is actually due to lack of capacity not renewable energy shortages.
• Rep. Dan Crenshaw and Texas’s agriculture commissioner, Sid Miller, also erroneously blamed wind power and renewable energy for the outage.
• Cruz fled town to Mexico, only to return 24 hours later after being hammered  for the trip. He previously urged Texans to “just stay home and hug your kids.”
• Democrats were happy to pounce, “Texas is the Republican factory of bad ideas and misinformation,” Abhi Rahman, a spokesperson for the Texas Democratic Party, told Power Up. “This is probably the worst state level crisis since Flint, Mich. and this could have all been prevented.”

Fact check: “Frozen wind turbines in Texas caused some conservative state politicians to declare Tuesday that the state was relying too much on renewable energy. But in reality, the wind power was expected to make up only a fraction of what the state had planned for during the winter,” the Texas Tribune’s Erin Douglas and Ross Ramsey reported. 

• “The Electric Reliability Council of Texas projected that 80% of the grid’s winter capacity, or 67 gigawatts, could be generated by natural gas, coal and some nuclear power.” 
• “Rich in both fossil fuels and self-confidence, Texas has long been devoted to its singular power grid, rejecting federal electricity regulation and the kinds of shared high-voltage connections with neighboring states that can be found across most of the country,” our colleagues Will Englund, Steven Mufson and Dino Grandoni report.
• Key: “The power failures that have hobbled Texas have prompted warnings that they are a harbinger of national disasters to come and dramatically illustrate the need to upgrade all of America’s electrical systems,” per Will, Steven, and Dino.
• Bookmark: “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business,” former governor Rick Perry (R) said this week. “Try not to let whatever the crisis of the day is take your eye off having a resilient grid that keeps America safe personally, economically, and strategically.”

• By the numbers: “More than 800 public water systems serving 162 of the state’s 254 counties had been disrupted as of Thursday, affecting 13.1 million people, according to a spokeswoman for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality,” Healy, Fausset, and Dobbins report.
• “The problems were especially acute at hospitals. One, in Austin, was forced to move some of its most critically ill patients to another building when its faucets ran nearly dry. Another in Houston had to haul in water on trucks to flush toilets.” 

Climate change: Department of Homeland Security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randal said the “extreme weather events that we’re experiencing this week across the central, southern and now the eastern United States do yet again demonstrate to us that climate change is real, and it’s happening now, and we’re not adequately prepared for it,” per NPR’s H.J. Mai. 

• “While scientists are still analyzing what role human-caused climate change may have played in this week’s winter storms, it is clear that global warming poses a barrage of additional threats to power systems nationwide, including fiercer heat waves and water shortages,” the New York Times’s Brad Plumer reports. 

The Cancun affair: Cruz vowed to do “everything we can to get the power turned on in Texas and to make sure that this never happens again,” but he spent more time cleaning up the public relations disaster caused by the trip, appearing last night in an interview with Fox News.

• “I had initially planned to stay through the weekend,” Cruz admitted during the interview. 
• “Nobody likes Ted Cruz. This was the place that Ted Cruz was starting from earlier this week. Then he went to Cancun. He went to Cancun, where it is mostly sunny and in the low 80s, while many of his ice-blasted constituents were without heating and plumbing, watching their ceilings collapse, huddling in warming centers, defecating in buckets, and generally not packing for a few days on the Yucatán Peninsula,” our colleague Dan Zak writes.
• The scandal broke wide open after neighbors leaked group chats showing Heidi Cruz’s vacation planning: “Further, Reform Austin has acquired text messages from a neighborhood group chat in River Oaks, the exclusive neighborhood where Cruz lives when he is in Houston,” Reform Austin’s staff reported. “In the messages, shared on the condition of anonymity to protect the identities of other chat members, Heidi Cruz, the wife of Ted Cruz, is apparently complaining to neighbors about the freezing cold temperatures in her home on Monday night, and asking them if they wanted to join them in their trip to sunny Cancun.”
• And “Snowflake,” the Cruz family’s poodle, was apparently left home. 

BIDEN’S BIG SWING AT IMMIGRATION: “Democratic lawmakers formally introduced President Biden’s immigration bill Thursday, saying it is imperative to pass legislation that would repudiate the Trump administration’s rhetoric and allow 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States to apply for citizenship,” our colleague Maria Sacchetti reports. 

The Citizenship Act of 2021 creates two paths to citizenship:

• “Farmworkers, ‘Dreamers’ who arrived in the United States as children, and people with temporary protected status — who cannot return home because of wars or natural disasters — would immediately become eligible for green cards and could apply for citizenship after three years.”
• Others will be eligible to apply after eight years.
• The bill  “sets aside $4 billion to address root causes of migration from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador,” The Hill’s Rebecca Beitsch reports.
• What Republicans are saying: “This is an unserious proposal that reflects how far left Senate Democrats have gone on the issue of immigration. Senate Republicans will not hesitate to share with the American people exactly how the Democrats’ open borders, amnesty proposal will put their families at risk,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) told The Hill’s Rebecca Beitsch.
• But: “Democrats face a daunting political reality: They need 10 Republican votes in the Senate to reach the 60-vote threshold to pass the bill.”

The bill landed the same day Biden issued new guidelines for ICE. “Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents will now focus on arresting unauthorized immigrants who pose a national security threat [such as terrorism or espionage] — a shift from the Trump era, when agents had broad discretion over which immigrants were targeted,” Axios’s Fadel Allassan reports. 

Go deeper: The bill’s unveiling “comes at a time when the president and Democratic lawmakers are already in the midst of another major legislative undertaking: passing another coronavirus relief package,” the New York Times’s Michael D. Shear reports. 

• Happening today: Biden will visit a Pfizer vaccine manufacturing plant in Portage, Mich.
• The trip is a push to build support for the $1.9 trillion stimulus package and comes a week before the House is slated to vote on the measure.

STATE DEPARTMENT HITS RESET BUTTON ON IRAN DEAL: “The Biden administration said Thursday it is taking its first diplomatic steps to revive the Iran nuclear deal, saying it would attend a meeting with Tehran and other world powers that signed the 2015 accord,” our colleague John Hudson reports. 

• Context: It’s all part of a push to reset international relations badly frayed under former president Donald Trump. In a meeting of economic leaders yesterday and in a speech today, “Biden will recommit to tenets of international diplomacy that Trump had abandoned, a senior administration official said Thursday,” Anne Gearan reports.
• On Iran: “The latest development in the nuclear talks comes after the U.S. and three of its European allies [the U.K., France and Germany] released a joint statement on Thursday warning Iran against blocking inspections by nuclear experts and violating the terms of the nuclear agreement,” the Hill’s Joseph Choi reports. 
• Background: “The Trump administration withdrew from the agreement in 2018 and imposed heavy sanctions on Tehran that left the country’s economy a shambles,” our colleague John Hudson reports.
• “In return, Iran breached the restrictions of the agreement and began enriching uranium at higher levels than allowed under the deal.”
• Iran and the U.S. haven’t spoken since Biden took office and it’s not clear if the country will attend the meeting.
• But it seems like the country’s open:

Meanwhile, the Biden administration plans to release next week “a long-sought U.S. intelligence report concluding that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.”

DOES CUOMO FACE IMPEACHMENT?: “The state Assembly’s Republican conference is introducing a resolution to begin the process of impeaching Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a three-term Democrat,” Politico’s Bill Mahoney reports.

• “The move is a sign that Cuomo’s critics continue to feel emboldened as the governor remains embroiled in controversy over his decisions about the spread of covid-19 in nursing homes.”
• The Assembly’s Republican conference will introduce the bill next week.

• Republicans: “The Cuomo Administration’s nursing home coverup is one of the most alarming scandals we’ve seen in state government. It is incumbent upon the Legislature to undertake a comprehensive, bipartisan review and render a decision on what steps must be taken to hold the governor accountable,” Minority Leader Will Barclay said.
• Democrats: “It’s hypocritical. The Republicans were silent while a Republican president was fomenting insurrection in the nation’s Capitol. They were silent on impeachment then, but for a reporting inaccuracy, they’re running around with their hair on fire. It defies credulity,” New York Democratic Chair Jay Jacobs told Politico.

It will be an uphill battle. “Impeachments in Albany require a majority vote of the Assembly, where Democrats have 107 members and Republicans have 43.”

• “No governor has been impeached since William Sulzer, a Democrat, in 1913.”

DOLE DIAGNOSED WITH CANCER: “Former Senate majority leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) announced that he was recently diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer and will begin treatments Monday,” our colleague John Wagner reports. 

• Dole served “eight years in the House [and] 27 years in the Senate.”
• He ran for president “three times, securing the GOP nomination in 1996 [but losing] to [incumbent] President Bill Clinton. He [was] also the GOP’s vice-presidential nominee in 1976.”

PERCY STICKS THE LANDING: After a six-month journey from Earth, “NASA rover Perseverance [also known as Percy] landed safely on Mars,” our Post colleagues report. 

• What’s next: “Perseverance will search for evidence of ancient life and study Mars’s climate and geology and collect samples that will eventually be returned to Earth by the 2030s,” CNN reports.
• Until then, you can track its journey here.