Travis County Judge Brushes Off TX AG Ken Paxton’s Threatened Lawsuit to End Mask Mandates Today: He Is ‘Apparently Confused About the Law’
Travis County Judge Andy Brown (D) casually dismissed the Texas attorney general’s snarky Twitter threat to sue his jurisdiction because it didn’t end its mask mandate as of 6pm on Wednesday.
Republican AG Ken Paxton fired off sarcasm-laced warning on Wednesday, telling Brown and the city of Austin that it has just a few hours to roll back all local mask requirements or face a lawsuit from his office. Paxton’s angry threat stemmed from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) announcement last week that he was ending all Covid mitigation measures and any mask mandates within the state as of today.
Paxton, who has earned a reputation as an highly controversial and partisan figure, suggested Austin and its county “must not be thinking clearly” before jokingly blaming it on “oxygen deprivation from quintuple-masking.”
“Whatever the case, they’ve tried this before. They lost,” Paxton went on. “Travis County and Austin have a few hours to comply with state law or I’ll sue them. And they’ll lose again.”
City/county leaders must not be thinking clearly. Maybe it’s oxygen deprivation from quintuple-masking. Whatever the case, they’ve tried this before. They lost.
Travis County and Austin have a few hours to comply with state law or I’ll sue them. And they’ll lose again. pic.twitter.com/eDqT1QHvGP
— Attorney General Ken Paxton (@KenPaxtonTX) March 10, 2021
“So, he says you have a few hours to comply or he will sue you all. Does the threat do anything to deter you?” CNN host Erin Burnett asked Brown on her show just minutes after Paxton’s deadline passed.
“It really doesn’t. It was pretty meaningless to start with, He is the one who is supposed to know what the Open Meetings Act is and there is honestly no way we could comply with it today,” Brown calmly said, before alluding to the local mask mandate regulation the county re-affirmed the day before. “We passed it in a meeting on Tuesday and to have another meeting like that would take at least four days. Before he tweeting about this lawsuit, he knew we were not going to respond today before 6:00.”
Burnett pushed back, noting that Paxton prevailed in the Texas Supreme Court in December in its campaign to end local curfew orders put in place due to the pandemic. “They are going to say this is the same thing,” she said.
“Our attorney general is also apparently confused about the law,” Brown replied, citing local emergency powers that continue to require mask wearing indoors. “Our public health authority who the city and the county have hired to be the person to say there is a pandemic or outbreak or malaria this is what you have to do. He is trying to tell us at the local level we can’t do that. He is trying to say our local health authority can’t tell us what to do.”
“We are working as hard as we can to get people vaccinated in a bipartisan manner,” Brown added. “Doing 50,000 a week. Ken Paxton is over here tweeting about lawsuits. If he wanted to do something, he could come this weekend and we would put him to work as a volunteer.”
Watch the video above, via CNN.
