Not to be one-upped by Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis and his war on public education, Black and Hispanic history, and LGBTQ+ America, Texas GOP Attorney General Ken Paxton is declaring war on the entire federal government.
Earlier this month, Texas’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit claiming that the $1.7 trillion spending law that keeps most of the federal government — including the US military — operating through September of 2023 is unconstitutional.
Paxton’s claims in Texas v. Garland, which turn on the fact that many of the lawmakers who voted for the bill voted by proxy, should fail. They are at odds with the Constitution’s explicit text. And a bipartisan panel of a powerful federal appeals court in Washington, DC, already rejected a similar lawsuit in 2021.
Realistically, this lawsuit is unlikely to prevail even in the current, highly conservative Supreme Court. Declaring a law that funds most of the federal government unconstitutional would be an extraordinary act, especially given the very strong legal arguments against Paxton’s position.
But the case is a window into Paxton’s broader litigation strategy, where he frequently raises weak legal arguments undercutting federal policies before right-wing judges that he has personally chosen because of their ideology. And these judges often do sow chaos throughout the government, which can last months or longer, before a higher court steps in.
Texas’s federal courts give plaintiffs an unusual amount of leeway to choose which judge will hear their case, an odd feature of these courts that Paxton often takes advantage of to ensure that his lawsuits will be heard by judges who are likely to toe the Republican line. These decisions, moreover, appeal to the deeply conservative United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
Paxton filed the Garland case in Lubbock, Texas, where 100 percent of all federal lawsuits are heard by a Republican appointee. Two-thirds of such cases are automatically assigned to Judge James Wesley Hendrix, who will hear this suit.
Hendrix, a Trump appointee to a federal court in Texas, is a bit of an unknown quantity. In his brief time on the bench, Hendrix did hand down one poorly reasoned decision undercutting a federal statute that requires most hospitals to perform medically necessary abortions. But Hendrix’s thin record does not tell us enough to know whether he’d actually be so aggressive as to declare most of the United States government unconstitutional.
The Texas federal bench is also riddled with judges — Matthew Kacsmaryk, Drew Tipton, and Reed O’Connor are probably the best known among them — who’ve largely behaved as rubber stamps for any right-leaning litigant who appears before them. It’s notable that Paxton chose to bring this case in Lubbock, where he was likely to draw Hendrix as his judge, rather than bringing this suit before Kacsmaryk or Tipton (Kacsmaryk hears 100 percent of federal cases filed in Amarillo, Texas. Tipton hears all cases filed in Victoria, Texas). But it remains to be seen whether Hendrix will show the same contempt for the rule of law as a Kacsmaryk or a Tipton.
So, while this case probably isn’t an immediate cause for alarm, it is a reminder that no lawsuit filed in Texas’s federal courts can safely be ignored.
Paxton, who is arguing that the current government spending bill is illegal because of House proxy voting, doesn't actually have to win the case.
He just has to get a judge to issue an injunction while the case is being decided. An injunction against the entire federal government. Boom, immediate government shutdown.
It would get worse, of course. Any new budget would have to be redone on terms of the House GOP Circus of the Damned writing the new plan. They could then get every cut they want, because the hostage (in this case, the entire US economy) would have been shot already and would be bleeding out.
Hours would matter, and gamesmanship could lead to a disaster that would break the country's machinery of operation.
Of course, everyone would blame Biden. Biden could ignore the order, but that's an immediate Constitutional crisis, and one with real consequences far into the future.
I'm really hoping this case gets dismissed, but again, all it takes is one crapass Trump judge to derail the country.
We'll see.
It would be a nightmare.
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