“Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has positioned himself as more than a Republican, but as a true conservative. It was with that framing that the leader of the Lone Star State signed a law to ban private businesses from setting their own terms of service when it comes to helping customers.
“Texas is open 100 percent,” Abbott said in a clip posted to Twitter. “And we want to make sure that you have the freedom to go where you want without limits.”
He will not extend that same freedom of association to individual actors who have their own enterprises. “The Texas legislature passed a law that I am about to sign that prohibits vaccine passports in Texas,” he added. “No business or government entity can require a person to provide a vaccine passport, or any other vaccine information, as a condition of receiving any service, or entering any place.””
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“The Texas bill “violates private property rights,” says Timothy Sandefur, vice president for litigation at the Goldwater Institute. “The longstanding legal tradition has always been that businesses owe an obligation to protect their customers’ safety, at least to some basic extent, and this law comes along and says, not only are they not free to make that choice, but they’re prohibited from doing so.”
The legislation uses several different state levers to strong-arm businesses into compliance. It weaponizes governmental occupational licensing requirements—something Abbott has rightly railed against in other contexts—and threatens to withhold “a license, permit, or other state authorization necessary for conducting business in this state” should a company run afoul of the law.
Perhaps more notably, it also precludes any entity that disobeys from “receiv[ing] a grant or enter[ing] into a contract payable with state funds.”
Yet it was Abbott who applied the exact opposite justification when he (again, rightly) signed a law that allowed taxpayer-funded faith-based adoption agencies to operate within their belief systems when pairing children with prospective parents. The difference here: One comports with his personal values, and the other—vaccine verification—does not.”
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“”It cannot be rationally justified,” adds Sandefur. “It’s simply a matter of people saying that the government shouldn’t force people to do things they don’t like and should force people to do things they do like. It’s totally inconsistent, and a violation of basic property rights and constitutional law.””