If you’re a Texas senator now seems like the ideal time to take a nice warm vacation. It will cheer up all those forlorn people in your state who are struggling with a power outage and subfreezing temperatures.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz traveled to Mexico on Wednesday for a family vacation as his home state struggled with a powerful winter storm that left many residents without power or safe drinking water.

The high-profile Republican lawmaker went for a long-planned trip to Cancun and was expected to return almost immediately, according to a source with direct knowledge of the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private conversations.

If you’re going to return almost immediately, why waste the fuel?

Hundreds of thousands of people in Texas woke up Thursday to a fourth day without power, and a water crisis was unfolding after winter storms wreaked havoc on the state’s power grid and utilities.

Texas officials ordered 7 million people — one-quarter of the population of the nation’s second-largest state — to boil tap water before drinking the water, after days of record low temperatures that damaged infrastructure and froze pipes.

But of course the people without power have no way to boil water, apart from the ones who have camp stoves and the like.

“Ted Cruz had already proven to be an enemy to our democracy by inciting an insurrection. Now, he is proving to be an enemy to our state by abandoning us in our greatest time of need,” Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa said Thursday. “For the 21st time, the Texas Democratic Party calls on Ted Cruz to resign or be expelled from office.”

Cruz’s office dismissed calls for his resignation earlier in the month.

“The left – and some grifters on the right – are consumed by partisan anger and rage,” his office said in a written statement. “Sen. Cruz will continue to work for 29 million Texans in the Senate.”

If some on the right are in the frame, how can the anger and rage be partisan? It’s one or the other, it can’t be both. Either it’s partisan, i.e. cynically deployed for electoral gain, or it’s not partisan, i.e. people are genuinely disgusted by Cruz’s cynical partisan defense of Trump.