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Midnight Order Bars Texas Republicans From Convention Hall

Texas GOP In-Person Convention Back On in Last-Minute Ruling

The Texas Republican Party is back to Plan B.

After a last-minute legal victory Friday in a battle with Houston’s Democratic mayor, the GOP was ready to move thousands of delegates into the city’s convention center for a weekend gathering to choose its presidential electors, even as the coronavirus surges in the state.

Now, with a bar on the move from a federal appeals court posted shortly after midnight, the Republicans are stuck holding an online convention that has been beset by technical problems. The party will have almost no chance of access to the hall until the U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans fully reviews the dispute.

Midnight Order Bars Texas Republicans From Convention Hall

The fight is one of several between Republicans and Democrats in which public gatherings, voting in person, reopening businesses and schools, and wearing masks have become contentious political emblems. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp this week sued Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms to stop her from enforcing a city mandate that people wear masks amid a spike in infections in that city. President Donald Trump, who has shunned the mask, made news a week ago by wearing one.

On Friday, after several unsuccessful legal efforts to gain access to the George R. Brown Convention Center, the GOP won an emergency ruling from U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes letting it reinstate the assembly. Hughes referred to the new virus as “the flu” and told lawyers “the only problem was unwarranted panic,” Collyn Peddie, Houston’s senior assistant city attorney, said in the appellate filing.

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner canceled the event last week after the city’s top medical officer testified that such a large indoor meeting could become a “super-spreader.” Deaths from Covid-19 in Texas broke records for a third consecutive day on Friday, at 174, pushing the grim tally to 3,735, according to state health department figures. The Republicans sued, claiming Turner had improperly invoked an escape clause in the convention contract to quash the free speech and assembly rights of a rival party.

Party officials say extensive social-distancing and cleaning procedures already in place would make the cavernous hall, which holds 50,000, safe for several thousand delegates. They say the delegates have been meeting in hotel lobbies and restaurants across Houston and that the city would be better off corralling them inside the hall under stringent safety rules.

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