Texas Republican in-person state convention canceled Wednesday by Houston officials
Texas Republicans will not get to have their in-person state convention in Houston next week.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner announced that officials with Houston First Corp., which operates the convention center, sent a letter to the State Republican Executive Committee canceling the gathering, the Texas Tribune reported. It was expected to draw about 6,000 attendees.
“This convention is not moving forward and it’s because of the public health risk that it poses,” Turner later said during a press conference.
Republican delegates last week voted meet in person July 16-18 at the George R. Brown Convention Center despite the rise in coronavirus cases in Texas and Houston, which has been a hot spot for COVID-19.
Turner, a Democrat, had called on the Republican Party of Texas to cancel the event for safety reasons.
Texas GOP party leaders said late Wednesday that they were studying their legal options and vowed to hold their convention, even if it means they do it online.
“In the coming days, we will evaluate all legal remedies available to us to fight back against the unequal treatment Mayor Turner has chosen to inflict on conservatives,” Texas Republican Party Chairman James Dickey said in a statement. “We will keep our delegates, alternates, and other convention attendees posted as we pursue those remedies.”
Dickey said the cancellation of the convention wasn’t about health and safety.
“If Mayor Turner’s motivations were pure, he could have canceled the lease weeks ago. Instead, he waited until the eve of the Convention to inflict the greatest disruption.”
Tarrant County Republican Party Chairman Rick Barnes said in a statement that coronavirus is “an unknown reality, so we can expect a lot of large crowd events to be canceled or moved to another format.”
But he said “what is troubling today is that the Republican Convention was canceled by a Democrat mayor who consistently makes partisan decisions. He clearly has no concern for his own residents while they participate in marches and protests throughout the city without any safety precaution mandates in place.
“Yet conveniently, Mayor Turner now takes it upon himself to be concerned when out-of-town Republicans want to have an event, knowing that nearly every safety protocol imaginable has been put in place.”
Texas Democrats, who held their state convention online the first week of June, praised the cancellation.
“Texas is currently experiencing an uncontrolled surge in coronavirus cases due to the utter failure of Republican leadership at the federal and state levels,” according to a statement from Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa. “Going through with this in-person convention would have been catastrophic and led to even more cases and deaths.”
This story was originally published July 8, 2020 at 4:19 PM.
