( - promoted by Matt Glazer)
Late in February, Attorney General Greg Abbott eschewed the law for political grandstanding when he released GA-0519, Abbott's opinion declaring as felons the good folks at Texas's district and county clerks' offices. Little did he know such posturing would come back to haunt him so quickly. Specifically, GA-0519 effectively rewrote a provision in the Public Information Act to read that all social security numbers are private under state law. It then went on---in a fit of "creative" lawyering--- to couple this revision with a reference to an outdated federal law that makes it a felony to disclose social security numbers. The result of all this activist judging was a shutdown of Texas clerk offices, which maintain hundreds of millions of documents, many of which contain said numbers. Open government, in short, took a break.
People begged and pleaded for "General" Abbott to retract his opinion, when its many legal flaws were pointed out, and after the opinion's grave consequences spread plague-like across the state. But Abbot, lacking the peach fuzz to admit his bad, took the unprecedented step of temporarily abating his word for the plebes to figure it all out. And we did. Today HB 2061---a law declaring the General wrong wrongity wrong wrong wrong---passed unanimously out of the Texas Senate and headed to the Governor, bitch slapping Greg Abbott along the way.
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