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When the snow came, the state of Texas failed. Its self-maintained power grid stopped working—and its politicians seemed to do the same: Senator Ted Cruz flew to Cancún, Mexico, with his family, only to take a return flight the next day amid outcry.
In the absence of political leadership from Cruz and other state leaders, many Texans continue to face dangerous conditions, their access to power, drinking water, and food threatened.
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Cruz is no hypocrite. He’s worse. That he couldn’t think of any way to help Texans is “a failure of imagination and of political ideology,” David A. Graham argues. (Cruz also appears on our list of the 147 members of Congress who chose despotism over democracy in the aftermath of the Capitol attack.)
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One of our Texas-based writers is freezing cold—and burning mad. Fixing the state’s power grid “will require actual governance, as opposed to performative governance,” Andrew Exum writes from Dallas.
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Snowy streets, darkened homes, and empty shelves: Browse photos of the storm’s fallout.