On the morning of June 23, 2016, the Supreme Court disposed of one of the largest immigration cases in American history in a single sentence. The judgment below was affirmed by an equally divided Court. Behind that sentence sat a Texas lawsuit, a 26-state coalition, and a nationwide injunction that stopped President Obama’s DAPA program from granting deferred action and work permits to as many as 5 million illegal aliens. Even the New York Times conceded that the deadlock had ended what Obama hoped would stand as a central legacy. The attorney general who built the case was Ken Paxton. His summary of the holding remains the cleanest account of the principle at issue. “One person, even a president, cannot unilaterally change the law.”
This fall, Texans decide whether to send Paxton to the US Senate or James Talarico (CIS), a state representative from Austin best known for woke viral floor speeches and his blasphemous seminary studies. Coverage likes to treat the race as a clash of temperaments. That framing is convenient and also a way not to read the files. The two men have occupied public office to different ends. Talarico has used the office to share his radical agenda. Paxton has used it to obtain injunctions, judgments, and settlements that carry dollar figures and compliance terms for the benefit of ALL Texans.
A constitution resembles a property line in one respect that matters here. It does not enforce itself. If a neighbor walks his fence a few feet onto your lot every season, the line on the plat becomes a courtesy unless someone sues. For a decade the federal government moved that fence on immigration, on speech, on elections, and on medicine. The live question in Texas was whether any state officer would push it back. Paxton’s answer was institutional rather than rhetorical. A state attorney general with standing, statutes, and a Fifth Circuit willing to read the Constitution as written can impose costs on Washington that hearings cannot.
The border makes the method visible because the paper trail is public. DAPA was blocked in 2015, affirmed on appeal, and left dead by the Supreme Court in 2016. When President Trump formally rescinded the memo in 2017, he was closing a file Texas had already emptied. Years later, the Biden administration sued to rip out the concertina wire and the floating barriers Texas had placed in the Rio Grande at Eagle Pass. Paxton took the buoy case en banc. In July 2024, the full Fifth Circuit vacated the removal order. That November, another panel barred federal agents from cutting the wire. Then came Senate Bill 4, the state law making illegal entry a Texas offense. After the Supreme Court’s 2012 Arizona decision, conventional wisdom treated statutes of that kind as finished. Texas passed one anyway. In April 2026, the en banc Fifth Circuit dissolved the injunction against it. Paxton’s response was short. “Texas’s right to arrest illegals, protect our citizens, and enforce immigration law is fundamental.” Reagan warned that a nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation. Paxton treated the warning as a docket.
The money is harder to wave away, if only because ledgers do not care about tone. In 2019, Paxton recovered $235.9 million from Xerox, the contractor Texas had paid to review Medicaid orthodontic claims, which instead rubber-stamped them for eight years. His 2018 suit against Purdue Pharma ended with Texas’s $286.5 million share of the national Sackler settlement, part of $3.347 billion in total opioid recoveries that now fund an abatement stream in a state that has lost more than 76,000 lives to overdoses since 1999. The Sacklers were permanently barred from the American opioid business. In 2024, Meta paid Texas $1.4 billion for running facial recognition on nearly every uploaded face for a decade without consent, the largest data-privacy recovery a single state has obtained. In 2025, Google paid $1.375 billion to settle a lawsuit over tracking users’ locations after they turned off tracking. For scale, the next-largest single-state Google privacy settlement was $93 million. A 40-state coalition managed $391 million, nearly $1 billion less than Texas collected alone. Add the $10 million Texas Children’s Hospital settlement, and the office’s decade comes to roughly $6.37 billion returned to Texans.
Some will say a large settlement measures only appetite. Fair enough. Ask what principle each recovery actually established. Xerox stands for a simple rule. When the state hires a gatekeeper and the gatekeeper becomes a rubber stamp, the contractor pays, not the taxpayer. Meta and Google stand for another. Texas law reaches firms that treat the country as a data commons with no owner. After the Google settlement, Paxton put it without ornament. “In Texas, Big Tech is not above the law.” Writers at the Manhattan Institute and AEI have argued for years that when Congress will not pass a privacy statute, single-state enforcement is the mechanism that prices the harm. Texas is now the ceiling those essays cite.
The same office took a children’s case to the Supreme Court and won it. In Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, decided 6 to 3 in June 2025, the Court upheld the Texas law requiring pornography sites to verify age. Justice Thomas, writing for the majority, refused the industry’s main claim. No person, adult or child, has a First Amendment right to access such material without first submitting proof of age. The attempt to constitutionalize anonymous access for minors failed because Texas did not stop at a press conference.
Election work in the office has been equally specific. Senate Bill 1 banned paid vote harvesting and required mail-ballot ID numbers to match registration records. District judges enjoined both provisions. The Fifth Circuit restored both. Judge Andrew Oldham’s August 2026 opinion said what election-integrity advocates at the Heritage Foundation and the Honest Elections Project have been saying in plainer settings for a long time, that mail-in ballots are prone to fraud and that unsecured mail voting puts the integrity of the count itself at risk. After SB 1, mail-ballot rejection rates fell from roughly 11% to 2.7%. That is the pattern one expects if an ID rule is catching errors rather than chasing lawful voters out of the electorate. Meanwhile, Paxton sued ActBlue, the platform that has processed more than $16 billion in donations, after investigators completed contributions using false identities and prepaid cards the platform had told Congress it no longer accepted. When a three-judge panel blocked the Legislature’s new congressional map, Paxton defended it to the Supreme Court. The Court stayed the injunction in December 2025 and preserved the map for 2026. That order is the difference between a 25-13 Texas delegation and a path to 30 Republican seats.
The fight that may last longest did not begin at a rally. It began in a hospital billing office. Texas Children’s Hospital, the largest children’s hospital in the country, billed Medicaid for gender-transition interventions that state law prohibited. Paxton treated the billing as Medicaid fraud. The August 2026 settlement is built to survive a news cycle. The hospital paid $10 million. Five physicians lost their privileges permanently. Bylaws were amended so that any doctor who repeats the conduct is stripped automatically. Transition services ended. The nation’s first dedicated detransition clinic, free to patients for five years, is required to open by October. Parallel suits against the NCAA and US Masters Swimming rest on a claim that does not require a seminar to follow. A ticket to a women’s volleyball game is a representation of the competition. Selling seats to a contest that includes biological males without saying so is consumer fraud under the Deceptive Trade Practces Act. The buyer of women’s sports is entitled to women’s sports.
Is winning those cases the same skill a senator needs? Not identically, and it would be silly to pretend otherwise, yet the overlap is larger than the campaign vocabulary admits because a senator’s actual work is oversight of executive agencies, the drafting of statutes that can survive a court, and the confirmation of judges who will read the law as written, and the lawyer who spent a decade testing all three in open court already knows which statutes have teeth, which agencies slip their leashes, and which nominees will do what they claimed at the hearing. Talarico offers fluency. He is, by every ordinary account, a gifted speaker, a former teacher with a seminarian’s timing, and the speeches travel. A floor speech has not lifted a buoy injunction, refunded a defrauded Medicaid program, or opened a clinic. Texans are hiring someone to keep the state’s claims intact, not someone to narrate them.
California, New York, and Illinois spent the past decade suing to expand benefits and to block enforcement. Texas spent it recovering $6.37 billion and putting enforcement back on the books, and you can see the difference in the river at Eagle Pass, in the statute book, and in an abatement trust that pays for treatment rather than press releases. The first duty of government is protection, of the border, of the treasury, of children, and of the ballot. Paxton’s tenure is the long proof that he treats that duty as work. The Senate has no shortage of people who can describe the duty. It is short of people who have already imposed it on presidents, on platforms, and on defendants who could afford to wait everyone else out. On the files as they stand, the choice does not require much theory.
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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com . Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.
I had this discussion with a relative in California on a recent visit. He said “Surely even you can’t hold your nose and vote for Paxton?” My response, though not as eloquent as yours, was exactly the point you’re making. I said “There’s been a lot of noise, much of it out of divorce papers and democrats about ‘corruption’, but nothing has stuck. His reputation, just like Trump’s, is nothing more than severe resistance to limiting government. Even if I believed the ‘corruption’ noise, I’d still vote for him because 99% of politicians are corrupt, but only a small number are effective and Paxton is wildly effective.” Thanks to this Substack, I was armed with examples. I love the guy and can’t wait to watch him wreak havoc in the allergic-to-effective GOP Senate.
Praying for a Paxton win!