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The midterms were an almost incomprehensible success for Democrats, who ran up numbers everywhere. But while the lion’s share of attention has — rightly — fallen on Democrats flipping the House and Senate, other wins are no less consequential.
Meet Nathan Johnson, who just flipped the Texas Attorney General seat blue. No less so than James Talarico or Gina Hinojosa, Johnson’s election is a profound reshaping of the Lone Star state and, indeed, the whole country.
The seat was up for grabs after Republican Ken Paxton decided to run for Senate and get absolutely crushed by Talarico.
Paxton had held the seat since 2015, and before that, Greg Abbott — who also went down in flames on Election Day — had held it since 2002. Both men treated the office as a sort of one-stop shop to thwart the efforts of Democratic presidents and to impose an increasingly theocratic hyperconservatism not only on the state, but on the nation.
That changes now.
Ending weaponization in Texas
Johnson was not expected to win. At the beginning of this month, he was running about five percentage points behind his Republican opponent, Mayes Middleton.
Middleton would absolutely have continued things in the Abbott/Paxton vein. He ran on vicious transphobia, which only made sense, given that as a state senator, he authored the state’s ban on allowing transgender people to use the restroom that aligns with their gender. He was resoundingly proud of this, running a campaign ad boasting, “I’m the only one in this attorney general’s race that’s been protested this year at the Texas Capitol.” The ad’s tagline? “Mayes Middleton: Kicking perverted men out of women’s restrooms and locker rooms.”
Middleton also explicitly ran on how he would continue the office’s legacy of aligning itself tightly with President Trump, bragging about their closeness and saying he would “use every resource and tool to back up the president, back up his fight to secure our border, to deport illegal immigrants, the list goes on.”
It turns out that Texans didn’t want any of these things. Johnson walked away with the race, beating Middleton by over 600,000 votes, an incredibly comfortable 6.5 percent margin of victory.
Johnson has wasted no time telling the people of Texas what he will not do. Indeed, he spent both the primary and the general election doing just that, which might sound curious for an incoming elected official. But Johnson is drawing lines in the sand galore, making clear he has no intention of protecting or enforcing some of Texas’s worst laws.
Almost immediately, Johnson said he would stop the absurd overreach instituted by Paxton and Abbott, where they were suing doctors in other states who had mailed mifepristone, the drug used in medication abortions, to people in Texas.
“I will not pursue the judicially absurd position that Texas law has extraterritorial effect,” he said. “I can honor other states’ shield laws.”
It’s honestly unbelievable that Johnson has to stake this claim, as before Abbott and Paxton, before President Trump functionally declared that he’s not obliged to honor the laws of blue states, it would have been unthinkable for a state attorney general to try to essentially negate another state’s sovereignty.
And when it comes to abortion, it doesn’t appear Johnson is going to stop there. Rather, he’s going to work as hard as he can at blunting the effect of Texas’s abortion laws, even though his office doesn’t hold the power to change laws:
“The first thing I do when people ask me about abortion is point out that I’m not a legislator, and I can’t change abortion law. What I can do is cease using Texas abortion laws as an instrument of persecution and intimidation, harassment and political showboating. All four of those things have happened.”
Johnson also appears committed to dismantling, insofar as he is able, Middleton’s signature achievement, the bigoted trans panic bathroom law.
Back during the Democratic primary, Johnson said the Texas Women’s Privacy Act was “a dumb law.” He also said it was unenforceable and he wouldn’t be staffing the tip line that Paxton had set up.
Yes, Paxton had set up a tip line so you could narc directly to the state’s top law enforcement officer that you just intuited that someone, somewhere, was peeing in the wrong place and should be fined $25,000.
During the primary, Johnson also said he won’t defend Texas’s wildly, objectively unconstitutional Ten Commandments Law, where every public school classroom in the state is required to display a very specific Protestant version of a Christian text. There’s currently litigation about that law, with the very conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upholding it as constitutional. And if the state legislature wants to continue to defend it? They can hire private attorneys.
Texas also has an absolute cavalcade of other lawsuits in the works that Johnson could choose to drop, like the state’s ridiculous suit against Planned Parenthood for somehow committing Medicaid fraud … basically by existing. (Unfortunately, the Department of Justice immediately stepped in to pursue Paxton’s witch hunt.)
Along with Florida, Texas has also sued to force the FDA over its decades-old approval of mifepristone, part of a laughable attempt to claim that it is somehow actually unsafe. Of course, it’s really just about making medical abortion unavailable across the country, even in states where abortion is legal.
Where much of the positive effect of Johnson’s win will be felt within in the state, it’s cases like this FDA lawsuit that highlight how much Johnson’s win affects the national legal landscape.
Ending weaponization across the country
Paxton led the way in suing the Biden administration over pretty much everything, filing over 100 lawsuits to thwart anything Democrats decided to do, and nearly always in a very tiny, very Trump-friendly, federal district court in Texas.
These lawsuits were rarely about something that affected Texas in particular. Rather, it was things like suing to overturn a nationwide rule that would have given more workers overtime pay. Paxton ensured that Americans everywhere can experience the joy of nursing homes that are not required to keep a nurse on 24/7, because who wants that, right?
Are you a blue-state resident concerned about vehicle emissions, perhaps even residing in a state with laws restricting those? Too bad. Ken Paxton made sure no state, anywhere, is required to track those emissions or, heaven forbid, reduce them.
This was nothing but Texas seeking to impose control nationwide, even when the majority of Americans elected a Democratic president to do that instead.
And that’s the real loss for conservatives. Though Johnson hasn’t explicitly stated which existing suits he’ll dump, there’s really no question that he will not be using his office to sue the federal government every time it tries to pass even the most meagerly progressive legislation.
It’s not really possible to overstate what that does for a future Democratic president — hopefully a very near future 2029 Democratic president. So many of Biden’s achievements and signature initiatives were beaten back by Paxton, and that simply won’t be originating in Texas any longer.
And yes, there are other Republican attorneys general who could step up, but as of last Tuesday, there are a lot fewer of them.
In Iowa, Democrat Nate Willems took out incumbent Republican Brenna Bird. In Georgia, Tanya Miller beat Brian Strickland for that state’s open attorney general seat. John Kulewicz snagged the open seat in Ohio. And over in Kansas, in an outcome almost as satisfying as Paxton going down, voter suppression enthusiast Kris Kobach lost to Democrat Chris Mann.
Where Paxton was sort of a jack-of-all-stupid-trades, suing over anything that struck his fancy, Kobach was more monomaniacal. His lifelong dream is to radically decrease who gets to vote.
As Kansas’s Secretary of State over a decade ago, he tried to institute a complicated dual-registration system that would have limited which Kansans could vote in state and local, versus federal, elections. During the first Trump administration, he served as head of the so-called Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which wasn’t really about election integrity but was about demanding states turn over vast swaths of data so that Trump could prove nonexistent voter fraud. During Trump’s second term, he signed onto a multi-state effort to support Trump’s executive order demanding states turn over voter rolls to help the federal government create a sort of master citizenship list and then allow the executive branch to essentially decide who gets to vote.
There are still true believers like Florida’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, who will continue trying to impose a a conservative theocracy on the entire country. But perhaps this represents a breaking of the fever that has gripped much of the country for at least a decade, one where Democratic laws and rules are seen as somehow illegitimate and to be constantly challenged while conservative states get to dictate what happens in blue ones.
These hard-fought wins won’t fix everything, but they’ll go a long way toward blunting the power of Republicans, and honestly, we can’t wait.
That’s it for this week
We’ll be back with more Monday. If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.
Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend.
PLEASE, someway, somehow, get with Sarah Kendzior!
Finally, we the people understand what she wrote and warned about!
She needs to be included in this horrible media blackout and the opportunity exists with PN.
Thank you for your important contributions, considerations, and listening !
Dear Liz. I've been basking in happy satisfaction for 12 days with the results of the mid-terms, but it was starting to come to an end. This article has kicked along the happy feelings for a few more days. Thanks heaps.