The state of Texas is pushing back hard against the Biden administration over its “flurry of executive orders” that appear largely targeted at the state, particularly with the oil and gas industry, Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush told Newsmax TV on Saturday.
“We set up a legal defense task force here at the General Land Office,” Bush, the son of former Florida GOP Gov. Jeb Bush, the nephew of former President George W. Bush, told “Saturday Agenda.” “As the asset manager of over 13 million acres, roughly of the size of the state of Indiana, we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.”
Currently, Texas officials are in Wyoming with the Western Petroleum Association concerning President Joe Biden’s freezing of any hydraulic fracturing horizontal drilling being done on federal lands.
“What it means for the Wyoming, the Colorado, the New Mexico, and the Texas economy, we’re looking at a loss of 120,000 jobs just on that executive order alone,” Bush said.
Meanwhile, Biden’s infrastructure and jobs plan includes calls for cutting emissions and imposing new restrictions on businesses, but Bush said he favors the counteroffer Republicans have made, which “strips down all the fat and the pork that we traditionally see when the left makes this lurch toward a large infrastructure spend as they propose.”
In Biden’s plan, for example, more than $400 billion is earmarked toward community care, and “most Americans don’t identify that as infrastructure,” Bush said. “I think any common, practical understanding of what the word infrastructure means does not include that.”
Bush also said he thinks, Democrats, with their plan, are “overplaying their hand,” by thinking they “have this universal mandate to spend as far as the eye can see and to tax hard-working entrepreneurs and small businesses.”
And when it comes to renewable energy, Bush said what he loves about the Texas model is “we are the No. 1 producer of wind power, and we’re No. 2 in solar behind California.”
“We’ve done that without mandates, without regulations and red tape,” he added, noting businesses compete in a market-based system that allows private industry to be assessed on a “pound-for-pound” basis.
However, he added, it is important to be sure there is enough power based on fuel, as shown by the power outages that slammed the state last winter.
“We need coal, we need oil, we need gas,” Bush said. “Renewables can be a part of that transition for reducing CO2 too, which is what we’ve seen here in Texas, but to do so on a market-based perspective, which has been the hallmark of what we’ve done here in Texas, the last decade.”
Bush also talked about the border situation, noting it is important to keep America as secure as it can.
“I’ve now been down to the border 3 times since the crisis began early on in the Biden administration,” Bush said. “We have yet to see President Biden come down to the border. We have yet to see the vice president come down to the border, even though she has been tasked as the [border] czar.”
He also pointed out, the president of Guatemala recently said 2 weeks ago, the early rhetoric of Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris enhanced and promoted the migrant situation.
“One of the things we need to do is restore the Trump administration’s policy on remain in Mexico,” Bush said. “If you’re going to apply for political asylum, you need to do so in your country of origin when it comes to legal immigration.”
The Border Patrol must also be able to focus again on Mexican drug cartels that are making an “absolute fortune” on the northern side of the Mexican border by “encouraging this false sense of hope to people thinking that they can come to this country.”
“A lot of communities on the border are actually tired of it and we’re compassionate people,” Bush said. “We’d like to have a legal process. Let’s reward people who do it legally.”
Important: See Newsmax TV now carried in 70 million cable homes, on DirecTV Ch. 349, Dish Network Ch. 216, Xfinity Ch. 1115, Spectrum, U-verse Ch. 1220, FiOS Ch. 615, Frontier Ch. 115, Optimum Ch. 102, Cox cable, Suddenlink Ch. 102, Mediacom Ch. 277, AT&T TV Ch 349, Sling, TVision, and Fubo or Find More Cable Systems – Click Here.
Source: Newmax
