In April 2024, the Biden administration cleared the way for more than 4 million low-wage workers to collect overtime pay. People earning less than $58,656 were to be paid time and a half if they worked over 40 hours a week, a shift that would put $1.5 billion into workers’ pockets, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Until Ken Paxton sued to stop it.
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A Trump-appointed judge, who previously worked at the Texas attorney general’s office, agreed that it was an unconstitutional overreach and struck down the policy nationwide.
Today, the threshold for mandatory overtime pay remains at $35,568, where the first Trump administration set it in 2019.
Over four years, Paxton’s office ran this same play more than 100 times, filing quick-turn lawsuits asking friendly judges to block President Joe Biden’s signature policies for the whole country. Texas was the tip of the spear, leading almost four times as many lawsuits as the next-highest state and marshaling unprecedented agency resources toward the cause.
This litigation machine had a profound effect on everyday life for millions of Americans, many of whom have never set foot in Texas. Because of these lawsuits, nursing homes are not required to keep a nurse on-site 24 hours a day; trans students cannot call on federal protections against discrimination at school; new housing built with federal dollars does not have to meet higher energy efficiency standards; and states are not required to track or reduce highway emissions.
Paxton’s record against Biden is his sword and shield on the campaign trail, where he portrays himself as the bulwark against the progressive agenda of a power-mad president, stymying him especially on protections for immigrants, the environment, the LGBTQ+ community, and abortion access.
He called on this record of “relentless challenges” when he was impeached in 2023, warning that his removal from office would enable Biden’s liberal policies to proceed unchecked. In the GOP Senate primary, when Sen. John Cornyn aired out the indictments, investigations, and infidelities that have long hung over Paxton’s political career, the attorney general ran ads calling himself a “conservative fighter who sued Biden over 100 times.”
He won in a landslide.
Now facing Democratic nominee James Talarico, Paxton has continued to trumpet his record against the Biden White House, frequently claiming an 80% win rate, which a Texas Tribune analysis found is overstated. A lawsuit’s lifecycle is complicated, and there are many ways to measure a win. By the most generous metrics, Texas got the outcome it wanted in about two-thirds of the cases it was involved in — lower than the number Paxton touts, though still plenty to throw a wrench in the works.
“It’s not always about winning. It’s often about delay, and dragging things out and making it more painful and making it harder to affect any sort of changes,” said Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston. “On that front, Paxton was extremely influential.”
Madison Cercy, a spokesperson for Paxton’s Senate campaign, did not respond to a question about how Paxton calculated his win rate, but said in a statement that his “results speak for themselves.”
“He filed more than 100 lawsuits against the Biden Administration, repeatedly stopped unconstitutional overreach, and secured major victories that protected Texas, defended our sovereignty, and forced the federal government to follow the law,” Cercy said. “Texans know Ken Paxton was the conservative fighter leading the charge against Biden.”
Border battles
Suffice to say, Paxton and Biden got off on the wrong foot. After the 2020 election, Paxton sued to overturn Biden’s win in four states, a long-shot ploy the Supreme Court swiftly rejected.
When it became clear Biden was going to be the next president, the upper echelons of the agency geared up for battle, said Chris Hilton, the former head of the general litigation division.
“There was a feeling of ‘game on,’” he recalls. “It’s gonna be four years of this. Let’s do it.”
It didn’t take long. On Day One, Biden issued a blitz of executive orders and directives, including a 100-day pause on most deportations.
“That’s not federal law, that’s Joe Biden made-up law,” Paxton recounted in a speech at the Grapevine Republican Club in
