My county has three state representatives because we’re gerrymandered to East Paris France and back.  Our newly elected state representative, Republican Gary Gates, fled the state when the going got tough.

Gates went to Orlando, so at least he was unlike Cruz who crossed the Mexican border in search of a better life.

However, like Cruz, Gates has conflicting stories about why he left.

Gates acknowledged the frustration of his critics, but stated that the decision to leave Texas was based on the needs of his family. His pipes burst, he said, and 30 percent of his home was flooded, leaving his sick wife and special needs daughter at risk.

“My wife is still recovering from an illness she has been battling for two weeks, and the room of my adult daughter, who is mentally handicapped and still lives with us, flooded,” Gates said.

He said that things started to mold. Yeah, oddly science works everywhere, not just Gates’ house.  So everybody else in the whole damn state – sick or well – was battling science. However, he left on Wednesday, the day after the first hard freeze so he must have some dandy super mold or something.

Then come to find out, he was meeting with vendors in Florida about his apartment buildings in Houston. Yeah, he’s a multi-millionaire landlord of apartment complexes so business meetings always come first.

“Since arriving in Florida, I have had functioning internet and reliable mobile coverage,” he said. “I have been able to monitor the power restoration process, correspond with constituents and direct the recovery efforts at our apartment complexes.”

And you weren’t cold, or, one to think of it, actually helping anybody. Most importantly, he’s talking about the apartment complexes where he evicted 100 families last September in the middle of the Covid crisis, so I imagine they’d just as soon he leave the state.