This blog originally appeared at The Texas Tribune.
Barraging the Obama administration with lawsuits, the Texas attorney general’s office wasn’t just trying to block policies. It was injecting disruptive, overtly Christian legal philosophies into the mainstream, and grooming a generation of conservative legal warriors.
Righting the Rule of Law
In November 2008, almost 70 million people turned out to vote for the nation’s first Black president and their hope for once-in-a-generation political change.
Barack Obama, a young, former community organizer, promised he’d help more people afford health care, stop the pollution of the planet, expand pathways to legal citizenship and help families dig their way out of the worst recession in decades.
With congressional majorities at his back, it seemed Republicans in D.C. would be hard-pressed to stop Obama’s liberal juggernaut. But 1,500 miles away, a group of conservative attorneys were loading the canons and pointing them north.
Over the previous eight years, the Texas Office of the Attorney General had transformed from a Democrat-led bureaucratic workhorse into a Republican war machine, peppering the federal courts with conservative cases and friend-of-the-court filings. Now, Greg Abbott, a man elected by 2.5 million people to be the top lawyer for one of fifty states, stepped up to do what his fellow conservatives in Washington could not: stop, or at least slow, Obama’s agenda.
During the Obama administration, Abbott’s office, and especially its elite appellate unit, the Office of the Solicitor General, became a government in exile, a refuge for the Republican party’s brightest minds. Top-tier conservative attorneys came to Texas for the chance to gain courtroom experience, burnish their bonafides and strengthen their commitment to the cause.
They had plenty of opportunities. Under Abbott, Texas brought more than 30 lawsuits against the Obama administration in six years, including an average of one suit a month in 2010. Texas used the federal courts to try to stop the federal expansion of government subsidized health care; block protections for young people who entered the country illegally with their parents; guard businesses against environmental regulations intended to stave off climate change; and even extend the fishing season by two weeks.
Texas emerged as an almost co-equal party to the federal government, casting itself as the defender of state sovereignty, federalism and the U.S. Constitution, and quietly helping push the nation’s legal apparatus to the right.
Abbott defined his role quite simply: “I go into the office, I sue the federal government, and then I go home.”
Reformation takes root
Several forces aligned to allow Texas to punch above its constitutional weight during the Obama administration.
In the previous decade, state attorneys general had taken a more proactive stance in the federal courts, banding together to pursue consumer protection and environmental regulation cases. Many states, including Texas, built solicitor general offices to improve their performance before appellate courts, and even bring cases to the U.S. Supreme Court.
This accelerated after a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Massachusetts v. EPA, granted states “special solicitude” to bring lawsuits against the federal government, effectively lowering the bar for states to get into court. The ruling’s true meaning has been hotly debated since, but Texas took it as pre-clearance to file more, and more ambitious, cases.
“The AG’s have really latched onto that,” said Paul Nolette, a Marquette University political scientist. “They’ve really expanded their ability to be, in some ways, unlike any other plaintiff. It’s just a lot easier to get into court for them.”
click here to see full blog: https://www.texastribune.org/2023/07/31/texas-federal-courts-conservative-takeover-obama-paxton/
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