Texas has made a career the past eight years on suing the federal government under the Obama Administration. Gov. Greg Abbott filed 31 lawsuits when he was the state’s Attorney General. Current Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed more than a dozen of his own.
But as Paxton has pledged to back off, will the increasingly liberal California take a page from Texas’ book and mount an offensive against the Trump administration?
Brandon Rottinghaus, professor of Political Science at the University of Houston, says it’s a possibility, but we couldn’t find more politically polar opposites.
“It would be ironic if, at the end of the day, we had liberal-leaning California fighting for state’s rights [and] Texas in the back seat,” Rottinghaus says.
But he says California’s potential litigations will depend on what the new federal government will look like.
“What kind of parent are they going to be,” Rottinghaus says. “How the government goes will largely dictate how the states react. … “If they in engage in a coercive policy – and if they have kind of hard right line about what states can and can’t do – that could really run afoul of what California wants to do.”
Post by Beth Cortez-Neavel.
