Greg Abbott discussed his campaign for governor with Joe Pags of WOAI 1200.
JOE PAGS: Greg, great to have you on. How are you?
ATTORNEY GENERAL GREG ABBOTT: Well, I’m doing great. First of all, it’s great to be back with you again, but today I get to visit with you from Fort Worth, Texas. I’m actually in a boot factory right now, Justin Boots in Fort Worth, Texas, telling people here in Fort Worth the same thing I tell people across the state of Texas, and that is, if they want a governor that will create jobs, they want me for governor.
PAGS: Alright, and Attorney General, just let them know, size 13EEE, I’ve got wide feet.
GENERAL ABBOTT: There you go. We’ll have one with Joe Pags imprinted on it. Custom-made Joe Pags boots from Justin Boots.
PAGS: That would be amazing. Alright, listen, I know how busy you are. You’re going crazy around the state and even beyond. A campaign for governor is not an easy thing to do, plus you’ve got your very very important job, a job I think you do very well, of attorney general of our state. We’ve got to talk about HB 2. We’ve got to talk about this law that Wendy Davis, going to be your Democrat challenger for governor, Wendy Davis, if you both come out of the primary, and I expect that you probably will, she’s the one who catheterized herself. She stood there for 11 hours and yapped about women’s healthcare and so on. She was railing against this law. It was a bill at the time. It’s now a law. This law basically makes sure, ensures that women who are seeking an abortion that you and I might be against, but if you’re going to do that, you might as well make sure you’re with a provider who has a relationship with, admitting privileges with a surgical center that’s close by. And for some reason, a district judge on Monday, Attorney General, overturned that law. A) Do you have nay idea why the judge would have ruled that way, and B) What did you do immediately?
GENERAL ABBOTT: Well, at first, in regard to the first thing you said, it is kind of interesting that Wendy is the person who enabled this law to begin with, and she’s been running from it ever since because she has realized, for one, that most people in Texas are not in favor of late-term abortions. She’s trying to push abortions after 5 months development of the child, and she just now realized, well, maybe not everyone in Texas happens to agree with late-term abortions. Now, second thing is what you were talking about, what this law really does is to help protect the safety and security of women. We’ve had this Gosnell tragedy up in Pennsylvania, and we’re trying to prevent things like that from happening in Texas where women have their bodies harmed and developed children have their necks snapped. We don’t want things like that happening here, but more to the point, we want to protect the health and safety of all women from all different kinds of medical procedures and even Roe v Wade says states have a legitimate state interest in protection the health and safety of women who go through abortion procedures, and that’s all this law does. With regard to the trial court ruling, remember this, Joe. This judge is the same judge who just a few moths ago ruled against the state with regard to the Planned Parenthood funding issue, and I appealed that to the Fifth Circuit and we won at the Fifth Circuit. And so, what we’re doing here, we’ve already apparel this to the Fifth Circuit. I think everyone recognizes, this is a case that’s headed all the way to the United States Supreme Court. These are laws that have been written in other states and other states have had them challenged in the courts, and the Supreme Court realizes that this is an issue only the highest court in the nation can resolve. We’re just in the early innings in what is going to be a prolonged battle as we fight to defend this law.
PAGS: It’s Attorney General Greg Abbott, Republican for the great state of Texas. What’s interesting to me, and Greg, you and I have talked about this a million times, you just alluded to it there, this literally, not figuratively, not politically, this literally ensures the safety of a woman who seeks to get a produced that you and I might be against, or that we are against, but if it’s going to be legal, it’s going to be available, the least we can do is make sure you don’t die or suffer some physical harm getting the procedures from someone who might not have the proper relationship with a surgical center. Whereas, if something goes wrong and you’re hemorrhaging, if the doctor doesn’t have admitting privileges at a local hospital, you might be dead.
GENERAL ABBOTT: And Joe, this is not hypothetical. You may have heard that there is an investigation underway in Harris County where issues like this have been raised, and we as a state cannot stand by and see anyone harmed who is going through any kind of medical procedure, and again as the Supreme Court has said, the state has a legitimate and rightful interest in ensuring anyone who goes to see a doctor is going to be treated with the due care that they deserve.
PAGS: The organization, primarily, Planned Parenthood, that’s fighting against this law, they’ve got very very deep pockets, and they’ve got benefactors that will fight this. You and I probably can assume the Fifth Circuit will take the side of the state of Texas, then Planned Parenthood and their lawyers will again challenge this. Do you see this ending up in the Supreme Court?
GENERAL ABBOTT: Joe, this is going to go to the Supreme Court regardless of who wins and who loses in the court of appeals, but you do make a very interesting point, and that is, for Planned Parenthood, this really is all about money. They run as a business, and what you may recall, this came out about a month ago, is that my office actually got a settlement agreement from Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast. They had to pay $1.4 million for Medicaid fraud because of the way they were conducting their operations, and so, these are not only business people, but as it turns out, some bad business people.
PAGS: And is there any argument, Attorney General, that they’re fighting for the benefit of women’s health? I don’t see it.
GENERAL ABBOTT: We’ve seen them fight for the own benefit of their bottom line, their own pocketbook is what this, in fact, if I recall correctly, in this trial there is someone whose testimony said they were running a business, they were trying to make money off of this.
PAGS: Well, of course they are. Abortion is a big profit center for Planned Parenthood and for other abortion clinics. That’s something that they can’t get away from, so to try to juxtapose making as much money as you can and not having a relationship with a surgical center and somehow you’re the pro-women’s health crowd, I don’t follow.
(COMMERCIAL)
PAGS: It’s Attorney General Greg Abbott. We always appreciate the time. Voter ID is in place, and I don’t know if you’ve heard anything Attorney General, but I’ve heard no complaints from anybody that they were turned away from voting.
GENERAL ABBOTT: We have monitored the entire state. We have documented statements from the people who are in charge of running elections and all the large counties in the state of Texas, and to a person, they all say that voter ID has posed no problem whatsoever. And so, all this crowd that has been saying the sky is going to fall when we have voter ID in the state of Texas…has proven to be nothing but a chicken little. And all we’re doing is ensuring the integrity of the ballot box. We’re ensuring that we don’t have people who are elected illegally. That we don’t have cheating and illegal voting. And it may be keeping away some people who have no business voting because they’re not authorized to vote. But it sure has not stopped anyone, who is a legitimate voter, from being able to go to the ballot box and cast their vote.
PAGS: It’s Attorney General Greg Abbott. I’ve got to ask you about this proposition 6. And I understand, as the Attorney General, it might be difficult to answer. But as a candidate for governor, we all know that we’ve got water issues potentially heading down the road. We’ve got 1,500 people moving here every day and already, the water pressure is low many times in our part of Texas, especially. We’ve had drought situations. Do you think that we need to dip into the Rainy Day Fund to make sure that we have enough water supply? Or is that something that we probably shouldn’t make a constitutional amendment, we should take care of locally?
GENERAL ABBOTT: Well let me answer that fully. But if you don’t mind, let me add one thing to my last comment.
PAGS: Sure.
GENERAL ABBOTT: I thought you were going to talk about voter ID for a second.
PAGS: Go ahead.
GENERAL ABBOTT: I’ll come back and talk about prop 6. But we need to clear the air about something. Because the Democrats in the state have actually trumped up something on MSNBC and around the country.
PAGS: Well what is that? What is MSNBC? I’ve never heard of that.
GENERAL ABBOTT: Well, I know…
PAGS: Oh is that on TV? I’m sorry. Might be a weird TV network somewhere. Go ahead.
GENERAL ABBOTT: So some people who are listening to your show may have heard about them. But it’s been trumped up in papers that you may not read either, here in the state of Texas. They say…They’ve claimed, falsely as it turns out, they’ve claimed that there’s a voter ID requirement that’s been especially harsh infringement on the ability of women to vote. Because some women may have changed their name when they get married. It’s important for you and for all of your listeners to know that those allegations made by the Democratic party have proven to be completely false. The Secretary of State’s office, who’s in charge of running elections in the state, said that no woman is being turned away from the polls because her name may be different on her driver’s license or other ID than it is on her voter registration. They’re going to allow every legal voter to vote. And to prove this point, I understand there’s a very large percentage of men whose name on their driver’s license does not match with their voter registration card and I’m one of them. So this is not a sex-based issue, it’s not a womans-based issue. And those partisans who are trying to make it be a womens-based issue have been proven to be flat out wrong.
PAGS: I have heard that. And I want to ask you very specifically. If a woman gets divorced a month ago, gets her name changed but hasn’t changed her driver’s license yet, you’re saying that she will have no problem voting.
GENERAL ABBOTT: I’m saying she will have no problem voting, whatsoever. What they will do is the same thing I have to do. You just sign the little sheet of paper saying that this is really you. And it’s the same thing, for example, when I voted for all these number of years before now, I actually never take my voter registration card. I’ve always taken my driver’s license.
PAGS: Yeah, me too.
GENERAL ABBOTT: When you do that, you just got to sign the little sheet into the voting record saying that it’s really you. And so it’s the same thing then for decades and it’s no big deal. And no woman and no man is going to be turned away because their name may be different because they got married or something like that.
PAGS: I’m really glad you got that cleared up. Attorney General Greg Abbott, Republican also running for governor. Attorney General, Prop 6. Are we for it? Are we against it? How we should do it?
GENERAL ABBOTT: Well let me tell you how we should do it because this is actually, Joe, this is very important. This issue is something that I talked about today in my stop in Fort Worth. It’s going to be an issue that I’ll talk about tomorrow in San Antonio.
PAGS: Right.
GENERAL ABBOTT: I’m coming to your town tomorrow to roll out my fiscal responsibility plan. I’ll be talking about protecting our budget, making sure that we do not allow Texas to be turned into California or Washington, DC. Let me tell you what my standard is and my conclusion is.
(COMMERCIAL)
GENERAL ABBOTT: My standard is, I’m calling for a constitutional amendment to protect the Rainy Day Fund in Texas. The Rainy Day Fund, Joe as you know, the Rainy Day Fund is our piggy bank.
PAGS: Yes.
GENERAL ABBOTT: And we can not be raiding it in order to pay for what are ordinary ongoing expenses of normal government operations. Currently, the way the law reads is that the Rainy Day Fund can be tapped “at any time and for any purpose”. And that’s just wrong. So here’s my proposal. To amend the Constitution, to limit the Rainy Day Fund to be used only for unforeseen shortfalls in revenue, which is originally the intended purpose. Or three other things. One is reducing current debt. One time infrastructure payments or expenses related to state disasters. So in applying that analysis, if you look at one time infrastructure payments, that’s what Prop 6 is. It’s one time taking of money from the Rainy Day Fund, not for ongoing expenses. Not for multiple withdraws. It is no tax. No debt. No fee. It’s just a one time removal of money from the Rainy Day Fund for the purpose of solidifying our water infrastructure for another 50 years. And so it would meet the constitutional criteria that I’m going to be campaigning on to make sure that we protect our Rainy Day Fund from being raided.
PAGS: Well I think people were being confused, Attorney General. Because I think they thought if you say yes to it, if it’s in the constitution, every year every two years you can go back and grab a couple of billion dollars if you feel like it to do some more stuff. What you’re saying is, this would be a one time thing. And if you wanted to do it again, you’d have to amend the constitution again.
GENERAL ABBOTT: No, I left out some details just to try to make it short. But the further details is, you have to maintain a certain minimum balance in the Rainy Day Fund. So you can’t be doing this every year if the balance were below where it needed to be. The deal is, there is a primary purpose of the Rainy Day Fund and that is to make sure that we can cover ourselves in the event that we have a shortfall. And another fact a lot of people have forgotten about is in the last ten years, we’ve had two shortfalls. And so these things come about periodically that we need to be prepared for. And that’s why we have to have that guaranteed minimum balance in our Rainy Day Fund to protect in the event that we do have any shortfalls. If we’re in times that we’re not having shortfalls, then a one time expenditure for an infrastructure need, it can be done if the other criteria are met.