Texans and the politicians who represent them have been at odds with California for years.
The two giant states have served as avatars for conservative and liberal politics, respectively, since at least the 1990s. “Don’t California my Texas” became a common bumper sticker, especially in parts of the state where the most transplants have arrived from the Golden State.
Texas politicians have made California a punching bag whenever possible, touting the Lone Star State’s climate of fewer regulations and more business-friendly policies. But behind the scenes, many of those same politicos have found they like some aspects of California-style governing and have applied them here, with a decidedly Texan twist.
Christopher Hooks writes for Texas Monthly that the change coincided with upheaval in the state’s Republican party. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Now, you’re going to have to lay this out in plain terms so people listening to us may be thinking, “Are you saying, Christopher Hooks, that Texas politicians are California-ing our Texas?” Well, what’s going on?
Christopher Hooks: Well, yeah, it’s a little counterintuitive. As you say, 10, 15 years ago, it was very common to hear Texas politicians lay out California as the great enemy, the thing that we were never going to become.
And that had a couple of different elements to it. But basically, it is that California lawmakers were meddlers, and we in Texans knew how to treat citizens, how to leave them alone, how to encourage business, deregulate.
And a kind of funny thing that’s happened over the last decade is that Texas lawmakers have kind of learned that they like to meddle and they’ve found some new ways to meddle.
Texas Republicans used to be in favor of tort reform. They wanted to give less power to trial lawyers. Now they’re trying to give more power to try lawyers.
They used to hate how California lawmakers used the power of the California economy to impose regulations on companies that operated nationally, and now Texas lawmakers are doing the same thing.
And also in the kind of a funny twist, the last Legislature, the Texas Legislature gave a lot more money to film incentives and they wanna create like a right-wing Hollywood in the state. And something has changed fundamentally and how Republicans think about government here.
So it’s not so much the ends, but more the means for accomplishing those ends.
Yeah, absolutely. A good example is Texas lawmakers passed a bill in the last Legislature to force food producers to add a warning label. If they use ingredients, some of which there’s no scientific evidence that they’re harmful at all, but if you pick up a bag of Doritos in the fall, you may see a Texas warning label attached to it that says this contains ingredients which are not allowed in Australia or Canada or some other places.
That’s a great example of the kind of thing that California lawmakers love to do, did a lot, and Texas used to not want to have any part of.
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You know, what you’re saying here echoes a lot of what’s being said about Donald Trump and the relationship with the Republican Party of the past, which was much more sort of pro-individual, free, very much more Libertarian-leaning than what we’ve seen with the Trump administration, which seems to be trying to impose certain values, or at least that’s the way a lot of critics view it.
Is there a relationship between Donald Trump’s Republican Party and what’s happening here in Texas, or does it, as you seem to be suggesting, sort of go back to some more cultural fault lines that have long existed between Texas and California?
Yeah, I think it’s both. I mean, when Rick Perry was going around talking about how horrible California was 10, 15 years ago, that was the Republican Party of like Mitt Romney and a kind of more traditional Reagan-style conservatism where you talked about free markets, free trade, free people.
And Donald Trump coming up in the National Republican Party kind of changed a lot of things around and create a space for…
Tariffs is a good example for that, right? I mean, that’s something the Republicans long preached against.
Absolutely. I think you’re seeing some conflicting thoughts about how government should operate. It’s coming out in the Texas Legislature.
What I worry about is that there’s a trend here that the last Legislature saw Texas lawmakers bring out some really strange and unprecedented ideas about how the government should work. I worry that the next Legislature is going to have even stranger ideas.
You make a special point of Texas’s approach to the issue of abortion. SB 8 not only bans most abortions, it allows third parties to sue if they think one has been carried out, even if they don’t have a connection to the case. Why do you see that provision as a California style?
Well, as you say, this bill contained a measure that would allow third parties to sue somebody who had helped another party get an abortion, kind of a convoluted legal mechanism that was thought up because at the time the Texas Legislature – this was before Dobbs – the Texas Legislature didn’t have all the powers to ban abortion outright. So they came up with this kind of strange lawsuit mechanism to enforce this law. That, at the time, was seen as very strange, peculiar, and without precedent.
But what we’ve seen in the couple of Legislatures since that bill passed, there didn’t used to be many bills each session to come up with a new reason to sue somebody. But this year, there were over 1,000 bills filed to do that. And they were about some very strange and different subjects.
There was one lawmaker who filed a bill that would allow the attorney general to sue and find a museum that showed obscene content, is one example. But lawmakers sort of realized en masse that they could file bills that created new causes of action for lawsuits, and then they started doing those by the hundreds.
Not many of those bills passed, but a few did. And it was seen as a rejection of this longstanding important part of the Republican coalition here, a group called Texans for Lawsuit Reform – a tort reform group that was very powerful and important here in ’90s – and without knowing it, the sea had kind of shifted under them.
