In April 2024, the Biden administration cleared the way for more than 4 million low-wage workers to collect overtime pay. People earning less than $58,656 were to be paid time and a half if they worked over 40 hours a week, a shift that would put $1.5 billion into workers’ pockets, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Until Ken Paxton sued to stop it.
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A Trump-appointed judge, who previously worked at the Texas attorney general’s office, agreed that it was an unconstitutional overreach and struck down the policy nationwide.
Today, the threshold for mandatory overtime pay remains at $35,568, where the first Trump administration set it in 2019.
Over four years, Paxton’s office ran this same play more than 100 times, filing quick-turn lawsuits asking friendly judges to block President Joe Biden’s signature policies for the whole country. Texas was the tip of the spear, leading almost four times as many lawsuits as the next-highest state and marshaling unprecedented agency resources toward the cause.
This litigation machine had a profound effect on everyday life for millions of Americans, many of whom have never set foot in Texas. Because of these lawsuits, nursing homes are not required to keep a nurse on-site 24 hours a day; trans students cannot call on federal protections against discrimination at school; new housing built with federal dollars does not have to meet higher energy efficiency standards; and states are not required to track or reduce highway emissions.
Paxton’s record against Biden is his sword and shield on the campaign trail, where he portrays himself as the bulwark against the progressive agenda of a power-mad president, stymying him especially on protections for immigrants, the environment, the LGBTQ+ community and abortion access.
He called on this record of “relentless challenges” when he was impeached in 2023, warning that his removal from office would enable Biden’s liberal policies to proceed unchecked. In the GOP Senate primary, when Sen. John Cornyn aired out the indictments, investigations and infidelities that have long hung over Paxton’s political career, the attorney general ran ads calling himself a “conservative fighter who sued Biden over 100 times.”
He won in a landslide.
Now facing Democratic nominee James Talarico, Paxton has continued to trumpet his record against the Biden White House, frequently claiming an 80% win rate, which a Texas Tribune analysis found is overstated. A lawsuit’s lifecycle is complicated, and there are many ways to measure a win. By the most generous metrics, Texas got the outcome it wanted in about two-thirds of the cases it was involved in — lower than the number Paxton touts, though still plenty to throw a wrench in the works.
“It’s not always about winning. It’s often about delay, and dragging things out and making it more painful and making it harder to affect any sort of changes,” said Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston. “On that front, Paxton was extremely influential.”
Madison Cercy, a spokesperson for Paxton’s Senate campaign, did not respond to a question about how Paxton calculated his win rate, but said in a statement that his “results speak for themselves.”
“He filed more than 100 lawsuits against the Biden Administration, repeatedly stopped unconstitutional overreach, and secured major victories that protected Texas, defended our sovereignty, and forced the federal government to follow the law,” Cercy said. “Texans know Ken Paxton was the conservative fighter leading the charge against Biden.”
Border battles
Suffice to say, Paxton and Biden got off on the wrong foot. After the 2020 election, Paxton sued to overturn Biden’s win in four states, a long-shot ploy the Supreme Court swiftly rejected.
When it became clear Biden was going to be the next president, the upper echelons of the agency geared up for battle, said Chris Hilton, the former head of the general litigation division.
“There was a feeling of ‘game on,’” he recalls. “It’s gonna be four years of this. Let’s do it.”
It didn’t take long. On Day One, Biden issued a blitz of executive orders and directives, including a 100-day pause on most deportations.
“That’s not federal law, that’s Joe Biden made-up law,” Paxton recounted in a speech at the Grapevine Republican Club in April. “So we sued Joe Biden on Day Three. That’s actually pretty fast for a lawsuit against a sitting president.”
Paxton filed in Victoria, where one judge hears all cases. Drew Tipton, a Trump appointee, ruled in Texas’ favor, blocking the deportation pause for the entire country.
The opening shot had landed.
“No matter what the federal government was doing, they knew that if they weren’t dotting their i’s and crossing their t’s, they were going to get called to account,” Hilton said. “An executive order comes out, it was going to get challenged.”
Over the next four years, immigration became the central sparring ground between Paxton and Biden. With Congress largely immobile on immigration, the Biden administration tried to push reforms through the executive branch — an approach many presidents have taken, but one that leaves their policies subject to court challenges, said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh of the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.
“A lot of the state litigation is, honestly, symbolic,” she said, noting it’s how states can flex their limited power over this uniquely federal policy area. Still, Paxton sued Biden more than 20 times on immigration alone and managed to derail major priorities, like ending the Migrant Protection Protocols, also known as the Remain in Mexico program.
In 2018, President Donald Trump’s first administration began requiring some asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for their hearings, leaving more than 70,000 migrants in squalid, dangerous conditions on America’s doorstep. Biden’s Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, reversed course, saying the policy had reduced border crossings “by imposing substantial and unjustifiable human costs on the individuals who were exposed to harm while waiting in Mexico.”
Paxton filed a lawsuit in Amarillo, more than 700 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, where Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk has heard nearly all cases since Trump appointed him to the bench in 2018.
Paxton frequently exploited a loophole in the structure of Texas’ federal judiciary system to guarantee his cases would be heard by a Trump-appointed judge. Because of the state’s size and unequal population distribution, nine judicial divisions had just one judge for parts of the Biden administration; Trump appointed seven of them.
Of the lawsuits Paxton filed in Texas, 90% were guaranteed to be heard by either a Trump-appointed judge or Reed O’Connor, a Bush appointee who has become a reliable conservative arbiter.
There’s nothing illegal about a lawyer seeking a favorable venue, but Steve Vladeck, a Georgetown law professor and critic of this practice, has written that Paxton turned a “loophole into an art form” during the Biden administration.
“If litigants like Texas are regularly able to obtain nationwide injunctions from judges whom they have hand-picked to hear their complaints, it should go without saying that public faith in the independence of the federal judiciary will be undermined,” Vladeck wrote in an 2022 amicus brief.
Kacsmaryk ruled that Remain in Mexico should be restored, as the Department of Homeland Security had “failed to consider several of the main benefits” of the policy. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, with Judge Andrew Oldham, who previously worked as Texas’ deputy solicitor general, writing that the Biden administration was trying to “supplant the rule of law with the rule of say-so.”
The case made its way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the Biden administration was within its rights to strike down the Remain in Mexico policy — a year and a half after Kacsmaryk prevented it from doing so, and only after several thousand migrants had been sent back to Mexico to await their hearings.
And after the high court sent the case back to Kacsmaryk for review on other grounds, he promptly restored the policy again. Paxton was jubilant, posting on social media that the Biden administration had “played games all the way to SCOTUS,” but its “open-border agenda won’t survive my legal attacks.”
Rochelle Garza represented asylum-seekers who had to await their hearings in Mexico. Having seen the human toll of that policy, she said it was unconscionable Paxton pushed so hard to ensure it could continue.
“Ken Paxton didn’t have to look into the eyes of a woman who gave birth in a tent,” said Garza, the Democratic nominee for attorney general in 2022. “Every time I talk about it, I see the faces of the people I worked with, and knowing that someone like Ken Paxton is entirely okay with adding to the pain and suffering of people just seeking protection of our country is maddening.”
Texas ran a similar playbook on myriad immigration policies, asking Trump-appointed judges to grant nationwide injunctions to delay implementation of Biden priorities for months or years of litigation.
Texas sued over Biden’s revocation of Title 42, a COVID-era order that made it easier to remove undocumented immigrants; the administration’s guidance on who to prioritize for deportations; a program to grant temporary status to some migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela; and a program called Keeping Families Together that would have allowed undocumented spouses to remain in the country while they applied for green cards.
The relentless drumbeat of litigation gave Paxton headlines on an issue that emerged as Republicans’ most potent political cudgel. The attorney general gave speeches from the steps of the Supreme Court, went on Fox News and put out press release after press release, presenting himself as the last refuge against Biden’s “unwavering determination to get as many illegal aliens into this country as possible.”
During a tough reelection campaign in 2022, as his GOP primary opponents hammered him on long-standing securities fraud charges and abuse of office allegations from his top deputies, Paxton cited this record in campaign ads and on the trail. He won the primary and beat Garza by 10 points in November — evidence, Hilton said, that voters don’t care about his alleged indiscretions.
“They care about what he’s done with the office, what the office has produced,” he said. “You can agree or disagree with the policy decisions, but he’s squeezing all the juice out of that office.”
Culture warrior
When Gov. Greg Abbott was attorney general during the Obama administration, he famously quipped, “I go into the office, I sue the federal government, and then I go home.” During the Biden administration, it was more of the same — although Paxton’s lawyers often skipped the trip home.
“I’d often get a call that would say, ‘Hey, we need to be on file with this in less than 24 hours, get whatever resources you need, just make it happen,’” Hilton recalls. “We’d work all night and get something together.”
Paxton threw more resources at the agency’s political work, as the agency’s other, more bureaucratic obligations fell by the wayside. Those leading the charge against Biden developed a playbook to speed things along by filing “minimally viable lawsuits” they could later refine, as former Paxton deputy Aaron Reitz said on a podcast in 2021.
With these lawsuits, Paxton plunged the office into the culture war clashes that were riling his most conservative supporters. He sued aggressively over COVID restrictions and tried to combat the Biden administration’s strong stance on expanding LGBTQ+ rights.
One of Biden’s Day One directives was to fully enforce Bostock v. Clayton County, a 2020 Supreme Court decision that established workplace discrimination protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Citing this seminal ruling, Biden issued guidance to ensure employees and students would be allowed to use the bathroom, changing facilities, pronouns and names that align with their gender identity.
To block these policies, Paxton returned to Kacsmaryk’s courtroom. Before joining the bench, Kacsmaryk worked at a religious liberty law firm and wrote frequently on the threat that enabling LGBTQ+ rights would create for “Americans who continue to believe that marriage and sexual relations are reserved to the union of one man and one woman,” as he argued in a 2015 essay.
He sided with Paxton on a 2021 lawsuit over the Biden administration’s first attempt at defining how workplaces must ensure they are not discriminating against LGBTQ+ employees, in which Paxton argued Texas was being forced to put “subjective views of gender” over the privacy of state employees.
Rather than appeal, the Biden administration issued a new policy. Texas sued, and Kacsmaryk struck it down again.
Equality Texas, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group, tracked more than 40 anti-trans actions by Paxton and his office during the Biden administration. Brad Pritchett, the group’s executive director, said being in the attorney general’s sights for so long had left trans people exhausted and terrified, and prompted dozens of families to leave the state. Even when Paxton lost, the press releases and competing rulings created confusion and fear over what was still legal, he said.
“He’s manipulated the AG’s office and diverted taxpayer resources and dollars into these cases,” Pritchett said. “These cases don’t benefit Texans, they’re just designed to harm people who are transgender.”
Paxton ran the same play when the Biden administration attempted to shore up reproductive rights after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed states like Texas to ban nearly all abortions.
Biden issued guidance reminding emergency rooms of their obligations under federal law to perform life-saving abortions, and telling pharmacists they could not discriminate in filling prescriptions for medications that can also be used to induce an abortion. Paxton sued over both policies, accusing Biden of trying to turn every emergency room into a walk-in abortion clinic and “intimidate every pharmacy in America.” Federal judges blocked both measures nationwide.
The oil and gas docket
In December 2022, the Biden administration waded into the swampy marshland of the Clean Water Act. For five decades, presidential administrations, businesses and states have fought over what wetlands and waterways should be protected from pollution by this landmark environmental legislation.
When the Biden administration tried to find a middle ground between Obama’s more sweeping protections and Trump’s narrower interpretation, Texas took a stand.
“It’s time to start suing,” Texas Railroad Commissioner Christi Craddick said during an agency meeting. “I think the AG’s going to have a good time with this one.”
Biden campaigned on an ambitious environmental agenda to cut greenhouse gas pollution, increase renewable energy and, in a comment many in his party saw as a gaffe, “transition” the country away from oil and gas. These plans sent panic through Texas’ oil and gas industry, which employed almost half a million people and paid $27.3 billion in state and local taxes in 2024, according to an industry report.
Texas elected officials vowed to fight. Abbott directed state agencies to “use all lawful powers and tools to challenge any federal action,” and Paxton filed more than two dozen lawsuits on this issue alone.
The oil and gas economy actually boomed during the Biden era, with Texas boasting record levels of crude oil production, which those in the industry said was in spite of increased regulations, not because of them. Ed Longanecker, the president of the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association, said Paxton was instrumental in holding off the worst of the new rules.
“He’s always been a fighter against federal regulatory overreach, and it’s clear for obvious reasons that he has an affinity for oil and gas, given its dominance in Texas,” Longanecker said.
Many of these lawsuits struck at the heart of Biden’s environmental agenda, like when Louisiana and Texas teamed up to block executive actions pausing new liquefied natural gas export permits and oil and gas leases on public lands and offshore waters.
For environmental groups, Paxton often served as a frustrating blocker. In 2024, the Biden administration added the dunes sagebrush lizard to the endangered species list after years of advocacy from environmental groups like the Center for Biological Diversity. This 2.5-inch lizard lives exclusively in the West Texas dunes, where oil and gas production has been encroaching on its territory, the groups argued.
Paxton sued, saying the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had not relied on the best scientific and commercial data available in adding the lizard to the list. He called the designation a “backdoor attempt to undermine Texas’s oil and gas industries.” The lawsuit paused the work of protecting the lizard’s environment. After Trump took office, the Department of the Interior rescinded the lizard’s endangered designation and settled the lawsuit.
Laura Parker, a lawyer for the center, said it can be hard for people to understand why a tiny lizard, or rare mussel species, or the lesser prairie chicken are worth preserving. But “humans will suffer if we continue to lose the life that exists around us,” she argued.
“In the balance of trying to consider industry and economy, and also trying to consider the environment, the scales tilted way too far to the point where industry is prioritized over people,” Parker said.
In a red state with much of its economy and identity tied up in oil and gas, defending the industry has served Paxton well. He’s long been funded by two of the state’s wealthiest oil and gas magnates, Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, and has garnered widespread support from the conservative-leaning industry. He has hammered his opponent, state Rep. James Talarico, on the issue, saying the Austin Democrat “attacks the industries we love here, the oil and gas industry, the industries that provide energy and provide jobs to Texas.”
“It plays well with voters in general, not just because of the dominance of oil and natural gas in Texas, but just because of the political makeup of our state,” Longanecker said. “He’s a fighter and people like that.”
Disclosure: Equality Texas and Fox News have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in The Texas Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.