The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, And Texans Are Paying the Price

Emergency session, email scandal, and the mega feud puts top GOP in danger

When the history of this moment is written, they might as well call it The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas: The Sequel.

Because that’s what the Texas Capitol has become: a glittering parlor where billionaires, corporations, and ideologues line up with cash and influence, while elected officials sell the public good to the highest bidder.

Texans are drowning in floods, freezing during blackouts, and struggling to afford healthcare or groceries. Yet their leaders stay busy doling out favors, passing culture‑war bills nobody asked for, hiding “embarrassing” emails with billionaires, and rigging maps to cling to power.

This is not leadership. It is a transactional theater of corruption, and the people of Texas are the ones paying the price.

The Emergency That Wasn’t

When catastrophic floods tore through the Hill Country this spring, killing more than 100 Texans and destroying homes and businesses, Governor Greg Abbott declared an emergency legislative session. He stood at the podium and promised that lawmakers would take swift and meaningful action.

But in Texas, an “emergency” session means something very specific — and very limited. By law, only the governor can call it, and only the governor can decide what is on the agenda. Legislators can consider only what the governor explicitly allows.

Abbott’s choices spoke volumes. Of the 18 items he put on the docket, only seven addressed the disaster at hand: funding sirens in flood-prone areas, improving emergency communication systems, allocating federal relief funds, and streamlining disaster response. Reasonable, though modest, steps — and steps that should have been taken years ago.

The other eleven items? A parade of partisan distractions Abbott packaged as “emergencies.”

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The Return of the Bathroom Ban

Abbott revived a bathroom ban requiring transgender Texans to use public restrooms matching the sex on their birth certificates — a proposal the Legislature rejected in 2017 after moderate Republicans, led by then‑Speaker Joe Straus, blocked it under pressure from businesses and voters. Today, those moderates have largely been pushed out or retired, and the unusual summer timing of this session has left even more potential dissenters absent, making passage much easier.

A Crackdown on Abortion Pills

Framed as “maternal health protection,” this proposal further restricts access to abortion medications even as Texas already has some of the strictest abortion laws in the country. With maternal mortality rates among the highest in the U.S., the policy raises serious questions about priorities.

THC and Hemp Under Fire

Instead of addressing Texans’ real healthcare and economic needs, Abbott called for limiting the potency of hemp products and banning sales to people under 21 — an issue that polls suggest is far down the list of voter concerns.

Silencing Local Governments

Abbott’s agenda includes a ban on taxpayer‑funded lobbying, a perennial priority for anti‑government activists. In practice, this would strip cities, counties, and school districts of the ability to advocate in Austin on behalf of their constituents, effectively muzzling local governments while amplifying corporate voices.

Rigging the Map

Perhaps most cynically, Abbott added mid‑decade redistricting to the agenda, explicitly at the urging of Donald Trump. Texas just completed its once‑a‑decade redistricting after the 2020 Census in 2021, and absent a court order, there is no legal requirement to redraw the maps now. This maneuver is a naked power grab to protect GOP seats and weaken the voting power of Black and Latino Texans in Houston, Fort Worth, and other urban areas.

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Disaster Deferred

If the emergency session had truly been about saving lives and preventing another tragedy, it would have been an opportunity to honestly reckon with what went wrong and to fix it. But Texans have heard promises before, and they’ve learned not to expect much.

The tragedy in Kerr County exemplified everything wrong with the state’s disaster preparedness. For years, local officials have requested funding to install sirens in areas prone to flooding. They were denied. When federal aid became available in 2021 through the American Rescue Plan, the county declined to use it for sirens at all, instead funneling it into upgrades for the sheriff’s office and employee bonuses. Some commissioners reportedly worried that accepting Biden administration funds would appear to be a sign of dependency.

When the floods came this spring, Kerr County had no sirens.

It didn’t have to be this way. Nearby Comfort, Texas, had invested in sirens the year before. Not a single person died there when the water rose.

That same pattern of rejecting help, underfunding preparedness, and ignoring warnings has played out across Texas. The catastrophic winter blackout in 2021, the deadly hurricanes and tornadoes that followed, and now these floods have all revealed the same truth: the state has the resources and the knowledge to protect its people, but its leaders choose not to.

The emergency session’s proposed fixes — more sirens, improved alert systems, disaster funding — are modest but necessary. Yet they arrive only after lives have been lost, and they remain outnumbered on the docket by culture‑war theatrics. Texans don’t just deserve better infrastructure. They deserve leaders who care enough to act before the funerals.

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Abbott’s Billionaire Secrets

Even as Texans were burying their dead and cleaning out their flooded homes, another storm was brewing in the governor’s office, one of Abbott’s own making.

For months, journalists and watchdogs have been fighting to obtain emails between Abbott and Elon Musk, sent from official state accounts. Those emails, they argue, could shed light on the extraordinary tax breaks, regulatory favors, and political accommodations Texas has showered on Musk and his companies since he moved operations to the state.

Abbott refused. His office claimed the emails were “embarrassing,” “intimate,” and contained proprietary information, language so loaded it only deepened suspicions. What could the governor of Texas possibly be discussing with a billionaire that is so private and potentially damaging he would rather flout the spirit of transparency than let the public see it?

The timing could hardly be worse. Musk, once a darling of the GOP, is now locked in a public feud with Donald Trump. Musk has insinuated that Trump had ties to Jeffrey Epstein, prompting Trump to retaliate by threatening to strip Musk’s companies, including SpaceX and Tesla, of federal contracts and subsidies.

And here sits Abbott, having hitched himself to both men at different times, courting Musk with lavish incentives while remaining a loyal Trump ally. Now, he finds himself cornered, unable to fully please either, and unwilling to risk choosing sides.

If the emails implicate Musk, Abbott risks alienating the billionaire who has invested heavily in the state. If they embarrass Trump or reveal Abbott siding with Musk against him, he risks Trump’s wrath and the MAGA base turning on him.

In trying to serve both masters, Abbott has managed to serve neither, leaving Texans wondering who their governor really works for.

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Paxton’s Web of Scandal

If Abbott has spent the past year trying to juggle the conflicting demands of his donors, base, and billionaires, then Ken Paxton has spent it simply trying to stay in office and out of jail.

Paxton, the state’s Attorney General, has long been one of Texas’s most controversial and embattled officials. Last year, he narrowly survived a historic impeachment trial in the Texas Senate after being accused of bribery, abuse of office, and using his power to help a political donor. He remains under federal investigation for securities fraud and obstruction of justice. His legal troubles are compounded by personal ones: his wife, State Senator Angela Paxton, has filed for divorce, citing adultery and public humiliation, after his long‑rumored affairs became a matter of public record during the impeachment process.

Yet despite — or perhaps because of — his scandals, Paxton now holds extraordinary leverage. As Attorney General, he will decide whether the “embarrassing” and “intimate” Abbott–Musk emails will be made public. Under Texas law, his office has 45 days to rule on whether the governor can legally withhold those records from journalists and the public.

The timing could hardly be worse. If Paxton rules in favor of Abbott and Musk and blocks release, he risks angering Donald Trump and the MAGA base, who have already turned on Musk and may see Paxton as taking his side. If he rules to release the emails, he risks alienating Abbott — who helped keep him politically viable — and Musk, a billionaire with enormous sway in Texas.

Paxton is trapped. Whichever decision he makes, someone powerful will be furious with him. Either way, his choice will deepen the cracks in a party already at war with itself, and further erode Texans’ trust in the integrity of their leaders.

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Rigging the Game

For all the noise about bathrooms and billionaires, perhaps the most cynical move on Abbott’s emergency session agenda is the quietest one: mid‑decade redistricting.

Just four years ago, Texas completed its once‑a‑decade redistricting process after the 2020 Census. Those maps have already faced legal challenges, but no court has ordered them redrawn. There’s no obligation under law to revisit them now.
Yet Abbott placed redistricting on the emergency agenda, not to comply with any mandate, but to protect a slipping GOP majority. The motivation is clear: Democrats are steadily gaining ground in fast-growing urban and suburban areas, particularly among Black and Latino voters. Trump himself urged state Republicans to redraw the map now, before the 2026 midterms.

The plan: slice apart Democratic-leaning districts in Houston, Fort Worth, and elsewhere to suppress minority voting power and create new “safe” Republican seats, disguising a blatant power grab under the veneer of governance.

It gets worse. Abbott has also refused to call a special election for Houston’s 18th Congressional District, which has been vacant since the March death of Representative Sylvester Turner, leaving nearly 800,000 residents unrepresented during hurricane season and critical budget votes. Instead, he scheduled that election for November, months after it could’ve been held. Critics accuse him of deliberately stalling to preserve a narrow GOP majority in the U.S. House.

The message is clear: don’t expect Abbott to act on disasters or representation. He’ll only act when it protects Republican power — either by redrawing districts or by choosing who gets a voice in Congress.

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What Texans Actually Want

If there’s one thing clear from the polling and studies, it’s that voters across Texas overwhelmingly want real solutions to real problems — not distractions.

Disaster Preparedness Over Culture Wars

A recent poll found that 52% of Americans believe the recent Texas flood deaths could have been avoided with better government preparation. Support for proactive measures is even stronger: roughly 70% of Americans, including about two-thirds of Republicans, expect the government to play a “major role” in weather warning systems and disaster relief.

Why does this matter? Texans want more than sirens after tragedy. They want systems that prevent tragedy. It’s not a culture war; it’s governance.

Healthcare Not Handouts

Texas has the highest uninsured rate in America: 21–22% of working-age adults (about 4.3 million), and nearly 12% of children, well above the national average. The state refused Medicaid expansion, passing up billions in federal support that could have covered more than 1.9 million people in the “coverage gap”.

Yet Abbott and GOP leaders overwhelmingly prioritized billion-dollar corporate tax giveaways — including to Elon Musk and Samsung — over covering children and working families.

Public Opinion on Priorities

Polling consistently shows Texans rate disaster preparedness, healthcare, and affordability over issues like bathroom bans. Bathroom legislation, once a headline-grabber, never commanded widespread support, and polls showed only around 44% of Texans deemed it “important,” with just 26% calling it “very important”. This isn’t a mandate; it’s a distraction.

The Disconnect

Instead of responding to these clear voter signals, leaders called for an emergency session that addresses 11 non-disaster priorities — bathroom bans, redistricting, hemp regulations — while sidestepping the deeper crises: uninsured families, crumbling infrastructure, and a broken health system.

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Closing the Doors

For too long, Texas has let its politics play out like a sordid backroom deal, a glittering whorehouse where power and influence are traded for favors while the people outside drown, freeze, and suffer. But Texans deserve better. They deserve leaders who show up before the funeral, who put people above profit, and who govern for the many instead of the few.

The good news is that this house only stays open if we let it.

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What You Can Do

Call your Texas state legislators and demand:
— Real disaster relief and infrastructure investment that saves lives.
— Fair and transparent redistricting, not partisan gerrymandering.
— An end to the “good ol’ boy” politics that protect billionaires at your expense.

Support the people fighting for you:
— Grassroots organizations working on voting rights, healthcare access, and disaster preparedness.
— Local and state watchdogs demanding transparency and accountability.
— Journalists exposing the deals your leaders would rather you not see.

This isn’t just a critique of Abbott, Paxton, or even the Texas GOP. It’s a call to Texans to reclaim their own house, to turn off the neon lights in the backroom, and open the doors to daylight.

Because the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas only thrives if you stay quiet.

Bibliography:

• McGaughy, Lauren. “Why Gov. Greg Abbott Refuses to Release His Emails with Elon Musk.” The Texas Newsroom, July 14, 2025.

• Texas Tribune. “Abbott’s Office Hides Emails with Elon Musk Citing Possible ‘Embarrassing’ Content.” Houston Chronicle, July 15, 2025.

• “Texas Governor Says His Emails with Elon Musk Are Too ‘Intimate or Embarrassing’ to Release.” The Verge, July 14, 2025.

• “Ken Paxton Enjoyed Surprise Boost on Day of Divorce News.” The Daily Beast, July 10, 2025.

• “Divorce between Ken and Angela Paxton Will Proceed Outside Public View, Reports Say.” The Texas Tribune, July 12, 2025.

• “Judge Agrees to Shield Texas State Sen. Angela Paxton’s Divorce Records.” Dallas News, July 11, 2025.

• Wikipedia. “Ken Paxton.” Last modified 2025.

• “Floods, THC and redistricting top Greg Abbott's special session call.” Houston Chronicle, July 9, 2025.

• “Trump Backs Texas Plan to Redraw Voting Maps to Benefit House Republicans.” Reuters / AP, July 15, 2025.

• “THC, STAAR Testing and Redistricting Make Abbott’s Special Session Agenda.” Axios Dallas, July 10, 2025.

• “Texas Floods, THC and Redistricting Top Greg Abbott’s Special Session Call.” Houston Chronicle, July 9, 2025.

• “Kerrville Siren Controversy Heads to Texas Legislature Special Session.” MySanAntonio, July 10, 2025.

• “Governor Greg Abbott Calls Special Session on Flood Response and Other Priorities.” CBS News Texas, July 10, 2025.

• “Flooding Safety Takes Top Priority in Texas Legislative Special Session.” NewsChannel 6 Now, July 10, 2025.

• “Texans Question Priorities as Transgender Bathroom Bill Resurfaces after Floods.” The Independent, July 11, 2025.