NPR host Scott Simon opened the Nov. 14, 2026 interview by noting that possibly no state’s politics will change more next year than Texas, where Democrats swept this year’s statewide races after Republicans had won every single statewide race for nearly three decades. The race with huge national implications for the federal courts, Simon said, was Texas attorney general.

Stephen Vladeck, a constitutional law expert and a professor at Georgetown University’s Law Center who formerly taught at the University of Texas School of Law in Austin, said the office’s national role was the brainchild of then-Attorney General Greg Abbott about 13 or 14 years ago. Abbott, Vladeck said, viewed his job as “waking up in the morning, going to work and suing the Obama administration.”

That approach started a trend in which the Texas attorney general became the “lawyer general for right-wing litigants — for red states — either to challenge Democratic presidents or to challenge blue-state policies they didn’t like.” The trend attracted many cases to Texas, Vladeck said, and the office has played an outsized role for more than a decade.

Vladeck pointed to Texas as the plaintiff in some of the biggest challenges to Obama- and Biden-era immigration policies, including the DACA case, which started in Texas, and the Remain in Mexico case. He said the office’s role also brought other parties — private parties and other states — to try bringing their cases in Texas. “Even the Trump administration has brought a series of cases about nationwide policies in Texas because the Texas attorney general’s office has shown itself to be so solicitous,” Vladeck said. “It’s going to be a pretty radical shift come January.”

Vladeck said the incoming attorney general, Nathan Johnson, “has already said he’s going to abandon Texas’ position in some of these cases.” He said he suspects Johnson will drop some of the cases Texas is currently bringing, including, just to take one example, efforts to challenge telehealth provider shield laws in blue states and efforts to try to prevent doctors from prescribing mifepristone, an abortion-related drug, to people in states where it is not legal. Vladeck said Texas might also drop its litigation continuing to object to any kind of residual status for DACA recipients, the Obama-era immigration program.

Vladeck said the powers that Republican attorneys general have harnessed over the last 13 years could run in the other direction, perhaps to go after private entities — noting that Elon Musk has a huge corporate home in Texas — and maybe even to sue Republican presidents. It “would be, I think, not beyond the realm of possibility to have a Texas-versus-United States lawsuit that’s now blue Texas against the Trump administration,” Vladeck said.

Vladeck did not expect a full reversal. Asked whether the federal courts in Texas, in the Fifth Judicial Circuit, remain very friendly to conservative viewpoints, Vladeck said they do. It “won’t be quite a mirror image of what we saw under Attorney General Abbott and Attorney General Paxton,” Vladeck said, because “you still have the reality that the federal appeals court in Texas is deeply conservative, probably more conservative than the U.S. Supreme Court.”

What changes, Vladeck said, is that Texas will no longer lead the way in right-coded nationwide litigation, and “I think it’s going to create something of a vacuum.” He said it is not clear that other states have the same political structure, the same interests or the same resources to fill the gap that losing the Texas attorney general’s office will create.

Asked about Louisiana and Mississippi, Vladeck said Mississippi “already has slightly more complicated politics, as we saw, having just elected Senator-elect Colom,” and that Louisiana’s politics “have always been a little more complicated in this space.” He said he does not doubt that the two states will try in some cases. “But, you know, everything’s bigger in Texas,” Vladeck said, adding that it is hard to see from the outside how much that particular office staffed up and was given resources to basically bring nationwide litigation on a regular basis. It is hard to imagine another red state, at least, having similar capacity without a substantial investment that would have to start right away, Vladeck said.

Vladeck also addressed Washington, where President Trump will face Democrats in control of both chambers of Congress for the first time, after Democrats made a campaign pledge to investigate alleged corruption. Vladeck said there is “no question that we’ll see roadblocks,” pointing to memoranda the Trump administration has already put out from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, trying to identify new grounds on which executive privilege could be asserted to resist those kinds of investigations and inquiries from Congress — even perhaps for third parties to resist those kinds of investigations.

Vladeck also cited letters sent this week from the White House counsel and from the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of Texas that he described as “basically sort of lecturing members of Congress about the limits on their constitutional investigative powers.” He said that whatever role Texas plays and whatever role Congress plays, “the administration is going to be subject to a lot more litigation and oversight in the next two years.” “How much of that succeeds, I think, is going to be very much up to the courts and to the Supreme Court in the final analysis,” Vladeck said.