Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick Blames Constituents for Giant Electric Bills: “Read the Fine Print” - Vanity Fair

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According to Patrick, people who were hit with $17,000 electric bills last week have only themselves to blame. 

By Bess Levin

February 25, 2021

As millions of Texans went days without heat or electricity last week, the few that somehow didn’t lose power no doubt counted themselves extremely lucky. That is, until they looked at their energy bills and saw eye-popping, five-figure numbers nearly a hundred times bigger than what they typically owed. “My savings is gone,” Scott Willoughby, a 63-year-old Army veteran who found himself on the receiving end of a $16,752 bill, told The New York Times. “It’s been 43 degrees in the house since Monday, and I still have a $5,000 bill,” Karen Cosby told the Dallas News. “How in the world can anyone pay that,” Ty Williams wondered aloud to WFAA ABC, after noting that his electric bill was more than $17,000 for the month.

Texans hit with astronomical bills—even if they did everything they could to conserve energy—have plans whose electricity prices are not fixed and instead tied to variable wholesale prices. Obviously, that means that when demand increases, their bills rise, with the goal, according to architects of the system, being to “balance the market by encouraging consumers to reduce their usage and power suppliers to create more electricity.” But when the Texas power crisis hit, the state’s Public Utilities Commission raised the cap on electricity prices to $9 per kilowatt-hour, leaving many people with completely insane bills to pay. And all of this happened because Texas, which is the only state in the contiguous U.S. not on the national power grid, and which has been under Republican control for two decades, decided to ignore a warning from federal regulators issued 10 years ago that its power plants needed to be upgraded or they would not be able to churn out electricity in extremely cold conditions—the kind the state saw last week. In other words, people like Greg Abbott and Rick Perry and Ted Cruz are the ones to blame for constituents’ gigantic bills, though if you ask Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, Texans who’ve had to deplete their life’s savings should spend less time writing angry letters to elected officials and more time taking a long, hard look in the mirror.

In an interview with Fox News, Patrick told host Harris Faulkner, “I saw the story about the high bills. Let me explain that. We have in Texas, you can choose your energy plan and most people have a fixed rate. If they had a fixed rate per kilowatt-hour, their rates aren’t going up…. But the people who are getting those big bills are people who gambled on a very, very low rate…going forward, people need to read the fine print in those kinds of bills.”

Sure, Patrick added that the “folks” who received $2,000 and $3,000 and $17,000 bills should “not panic” and that the government is “going to figure that out,” but he also said that he’s going to get to the bottom of why Texas‘s power grid failed in such a spectacular fashion when, again, the state was warned a decade ago that it needed to winterize its power plants. So it doesn’t really seem like Patrick is great at figuring things out.

Patrick, who has been described by the Dallas Morning News as “the icon for exactly what’s wrong with the Republican Party in Texas,” was most recently in the news for basically trying to bribe people to report 2020 election voter fraud that never happened. Before that, he famously suggested, at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, that seniors should volunteer to die to save the economy, claiming that “lots of grandparents” were willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause.

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You’ll never believe it but Marjorie Taylor Greene—she of racist, anti-Semitic comments and batshit f--king crazy conspiracy theories—also has some transphobic things to say

According to Representative Don Beyer, the Georgia congresswoman tried to adjourn the House and end official business on Wednesday in protest of the Equality Act, which would amend the 1964 Civil Rights Act to prevent discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. The move, which failed, came after Greene suggested on Tuesday that the law would “protect pedophiles,” and after she claimed in a speech on the House floor Wednesday morning that the Equality Act would “put trans rights above women’s rights, above our daughters, our sisters, our friends, our grandmothers, our aunts. It’s too much. As a woman I competed in sports…but I competed against biological women.”

Of course, as The Advocate points out and all non-transphophic people know, the Equality Act will obviously not “protect pedophiles, as pedophilia is a crime.” It also won’t put “trans rights above women’s rights,” the tip-off being in the title and the definition of the word “equality.” What it will do, per NPR, is:

Explicitly enshrine...nondiscrimination protections into law for sexual orientation and gender identity, rather than those protections being looped in under the umbrella of “sex.” However, the Equality Act would also substantially expand those protections.

The Civil Rights Act covered discrimination in certain areas, like employment and housing. The Equality Act would expand that to cover federally funded programs, as well as “public accommodations”—a broad category including retail stores and stadiums, for example. (“Public accommodations” is also a category that the bill broadens, to include online retailers and transportation providers, for example. Because of that, many types of discrimination the Civil Rights Act currently prohibits—like racial or religious discrimination—would now also be explicitly covered at those types of establishments.)

That means businesses like, for example, bakeries wouldn’t be able to refuse to make wedding cakes for same-sex couples, a byproduct of the act that will no doubt enrage Greene.

And in other Greene news...

It turns out one of her best friends was among the rioters storming the Capitol on January 6. Per CNN’s KFile:

In tweets after the Capitol insurrection, Greene falsely suggested that those who had broken into the Capitol were not Republicans and instead falsely implied so-called “antifa” dressed as Trump supporters were to blame. In fact, Anthony Aguero, a conservative livestreamer, activist, and associate of Greene, said on video following the January 6 assault on the Capitol that he had been among those who entered and attacked those who falsely claimed it was done by “antifa.”

“We were all there. It was not antifa and it was not BLM. It was Trump supporters that did that yesterday. I’m the first to admit it, being one myself,” said Aguero in a video posted on January 7. “I walked amongst all those people,” he added, later defending entering the Capitol.… “A message was sent,” Aguero said in the video streamed live on January 6 while walking away from the Capitol on Pennsylvania Avenue following the riot. “These politicians are not going to continue to get away with the abuse as they’ve been doing. We will continue to press on these individuals.”

According to KFILE, Greene and Aguero have worked closely together on numerous causes over the years and attended pro-Trump rallies together. In numerous now-deleted videos, Greene calls Aguero "amazing" and a "friend,” while Aguero has called Greene "one of my closest friends." Greene was among lawmakers who tried and failed to block the certification of Joe Biden’s win on January 6 later in the month was temporarily locked out of Twitter for baselessly claiming the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.

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