name calling. Mean tweets. A governor’s quick veto pen.

What does all that have to do with the latest batch

of migrants dragged into a red state and deposited in California?

The shipment arrived last week courtesy of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Forty-two people, and let’s not forget they are people, arrived in downtown Los Angeles, presumably both starving and scared after a 23-hour bus ride on starvation rations.

It’s all political, of course.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who spent Monday in California raising cash for his presidential bid, brought forward his visit by dumping two planeloads of asylum seekers in Sacramento earlier this month.

They were lied to about promised jobs and lawyers to expedite their bid for legal status, but at least DeSantis got some

Hi

Wanted: Several days of national coverage to boost his energetic campaign and a chance to take it out on his nemesis, Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Abbott is not running for president.

At least not in 2024.

But he finds himself caught up in an increasingly nasty feud with fellow Texas Republicans, most prominent among them the state’s lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, who has turned an uneasy relationship with the state’s president into all-out war.

So what better way to remind people who is in charge than for Abbott to stir up the immigration issue and round up some helpless, ignorant victims and send them to that most hated liberal neighborhood.

“Immigration is the great unifier among Republicans, especially in Texas,” said Jim Henson, who directs the Texas Politics Project at the state’s flagship university in Austin. “At a time when Republicans in the state are at each other’s throats, it’s certainly with the widest swath of grassroots.”

Additionally, he added, “In Texas, you can never go wrong bashing California.”

If you want to know what’s wrong with our political system, look no further than the immigration issue. The outlines of a political compromise are not difficult to see.

One side wants stricter border enforcement. The other seeks shelter for people already in the country without legal sanction. They meet somewhere in or around the middle.

finished

But resolution and compromise have plagued Congress for decades, largely because of the growing rift between the parties and the two parties’ most ardent supporters. (Immigration is an issue that needs to be addressed at the federal level, as we’ve seen in the tension between states.)

The conflict is exacerbated by partisan media and the pernicious practice of gerrymandering.

Drawing district boundaries to ensure one party or the other prevails has reduced competition for congressional seats; the biggest fear many legislators have is losing a primary to someone considered ideologically “pure.”

In that environment, compromise is not a virtue, but a “sell-out” to the other side.

And many Republicans, in particular, find much profit in playing with partisan animosities, proving their “toughness” through stunts such as shipping hapless migrants from the red state to the blue one.

“It’s a race to the bottom,” said Jeronimo Cortina, who teaches political science at the University of Houston. “Instead of competing for technology companies and whatever, we now have a contest between governors who want to target a very specific part of the Republican Party.”

No wonder Abbott’s political team was upset last summer when DeSantis arranged to ship a group of asylum seekers from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard.

It wasn’t the inhumanity. It was the stolen thunder.

A few things to know about Texas politics:

It is by all accounts a one-party Republican state.

The lieutenant governor is elected separately from the governor, not as his or her running mate.

The position is powerful

.

The Lieutenant Governor presides over the Senate and wields considerable influence, not least over the state budget.

Patrick and Abbott’s fellow Republicans differ in temperament,

Patrick is a former talk radio host and Abbott has served on the state Supreme Court.

They also disagree on policy, with Patrick being the more belligerent conservative or Trumpier, if you will, of the two.

Despite this, the governor and lieutenant governor worked together and got on reasonably well to the end

legislation legislative

session, when a fight broke out over the best way to lower the state’s skyrocketing property taxes.

On one side is Patrick. On the other side is Abbott and the GOP House speaker, Dade Phelan or “California Dade,” as Patrick called the Beaumont-born Texan. (That was not meant as a compliment.)

As tensions escalated, Abbott and Patrick began to argue openly.

In recent days, Patrick fired off a series of taunting tweets. Abbott responded this weekend by vetoing numerous bills, most of which came from the Senate, saying lawmakers should resolve the property tax battle first

and do it his way.

It was quite a spectacle, say longtime Texas political observers, who have never seen anything like it.

So with his authority within the GOP challenged and his political position under attack, Abbott turned to a familiar playbook, which focused on California and attacking border policies under the Biden administration.

Putting migrants on a bus and sending them out of the state is a way of reminding people, Henson said, that the governor wields the preeminent power in Texas.

It’s also reassuring for the Republican State Party base, Henson suggested, “like tuning into a classic rock station” to catch an old familiar song.

“The governor,” he said, “knows what people want to hear.”

Never mind the votes of those 42 people who are being played as political pawns.