Democrats just seized one of the Republican Party’s most powerful weapons
Vox · Ian Millhiser ·
There’s now a clog in the Republican Party’s litigation pipeline.
If you paid attention to Supreme Court litigation during the Biden administration, you would have noticed a surprisingly high number of cases with names like Biden v. Texas or United States v. Texas. Texas’s outgoing attorney general, Ken Paxton, once bragged that he sued the Biden administration 106 times during his time as Texas’s top legal officer.
For years, Texas was the locus of the Republican Party’s quest to shape policy through litigation, especially during Democratic presidencies when Republicans could not use the US Department of Justice to bring cases.
But the Republican Party’s entire legal strategy was dealt a very serious blow during Tuesday’s electoral landslide for Republicans. One of the casualties was Mayes Middleton, the Republican who hoped to succeed Paxton as attorney general. For the first time since the late 1990s, Texas’s top lawyer will be a Democrat, Attorney General-elect Nathan Johnson.