Texas’s Next Attorney General Promises to Stop Suing Washington 'for Fun’

For four years, the State of Texas answered Washington in federal court. Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the Biden administration more than 100 times, and Texas led almost four times as many lawsuits as the next-highest state, according to a Texas Tribune analysis published in July. More than 20 of those suits were about immigration. More than two dozen were about oil and gas.

That posture is about to change. Attorney General-elect Nathan Johnson, a Democrat who won the office on November 3, told the Tribune in October, “My approach will not be to sue the president for fun. I have no desire to waste my time tying up resources in litigation against the federal government if I don’t have to.” After the election he went further. “The Texas AG’s office has been operating as the private law firm of the MAGA movement,” he told Reuters. “No more.”

Johnson told Reuters the office “was never conceived to be an extension of federal immigration enforcement,” and said that where that work had pulled from the office’s proper function, “we’re going to have a change of plans.” Reuters reported he will review Paxton’s actions against out-of-state abortion providers, his claims linking over-the-counter medications to autism and his suits challenging vaccine efficacy. Johnson told CBS Texas he would “clear out the political nonsense.” He has not ruled out suing Washington himself. He told CBS Texas he would examine whether federal Medicaid officials have the legal authority to cut “another couple hundred billion dollars” from state programs, and that if they do not, “I would be challenging the federal government.”

A new attorney general can walk away from a predecessor’s cases, and Michigan showed how fast. Attorney General Dana Nessel withdrew her state from 26 federal cases in her first five weeks in office in 2019, the Michigan Advance reported.

The effect reaches past Texas. The Texas office supports more than 4,000 people, including more than 750 attorneys, Bloomberg Law reported Monday, and starting in January no state on the southern border will have a Republican attorney general. Democrats also won the attorney general’s races in Ohio, Georgia, Iowa and Kansas, according to Reuters. “The red-state coalition has effectively been beheaded,” Michelle Kallen, a former Virginia solicitor general, told Bloomberg Law. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier said his office “has been leading these fights since the day I took office, and we’re going to keep leading them.”

None of the lawsuits settled who decides. By the most generous measure, Texas got the outcome it wanted in about two-thirds of its cases against the Biden administration, the Tribune found. Each win held only as long as the administration and the policy did. When the Justice Department sued Texas in June 2025 over in-state college tuition for students without legal status, Paxton’s office agreed the same day that the state’s own law was unconstitutional, and a federal judge struck it down. Now the office will turn again in January. Texas’s legal defense against Washington has reversed course twice in two years, each time because of who won an election, and the lawsuits never changed which government has the final word.