Illustration by Alex Nabaum
This article appears as part of a special issue of The American Prospect magazine on state policy divergence and aggression. Subscribe here.
Goliad County, Texas, is a pleasant jurisdiction of about 7,000 people nestled in the state’s coastal plain, on an indirect driving route from San Antonio to Corpus Christi. It is generally unremarkable except for its historical sites, which recount centuries of resistance to central, and federal, authority. Goliad exemplifies a certain bullheaded tendency that Texans have traditionally cherished above all other qualities.
During the Mexican War of Independence, the opponents of New Spain hid here. When Texans chose to revolt, the Mexican army massacred some 425 prisoners of war here, causing Anglo soldiers to cry Goliad’s name for the rest of the war. After Goliad voted in favor of secession in 1861, it prospered as a stop on the Cotton Road, by which planters would smuggle their crops to Mexico past that tyrant Abraham Lincoln’s dreaded navy. When the federal army attempted to reconstruct Goliad, the courthouse burned in suspicious circumstances, destroying postwar land deeds.
Generations of the state’s schoolchildren have been taken to the site of the massacre, the Presidio La Bahía, and told about the crimes of the Mexican dictator Antonio López de Santa Anna and his centralists. In Texas, it is in the blood: Resistance to tyranny—or bureaucracy, or the White House—is obedience to God, though what party is the tyrant and what party is the tyrannized is, as always, in the eye of the beholder.
That mindset makes it perhaps a little easier to understand what happened on August 28, 2023, in the Goliad County Courthouse—the one built to replace the building that burned. The County Commissioners Court, the Texas form of a county council, passed a measure that at first glance resembled the kind of toothless resolution local governments often pass to comment on national issues. “The Goliad County Commissioners’ Court finds that abortion is a murderous act of violence,” the ordinance read. Abortion and abortion-inducing drugs would now be banned in the unincorporated parts of the county.
Standard stuff. Because by this point abortion had already been banned for more than a year under Texas law, this meant little. But then, in the text, a legal theory emerged that may as well have come from Mars. With immediate effect, the county government created a new offense of “abortion trafficking.” Any individual who assists a pregnant woman in procuring an abortion—a woman who drives her friend, say, from Baltimore to a clinic in Los Angeles, both jurisdictions where abortion is legal—would commit an offense if their route clipped through any of the unincorporated parts of Goliad.
Stranger still was the relief prescribed in the ordinance, which mimicked a novel legal device used by the Texas state legislature in Senate Bill 8, the so-called “abortion bounty” law. “Any person” other than a member of county government could sue someone who facilitated an abortion in some way connected to the county roads, and potentially receive injunctive relief from the Goliad courts, damages for emotional distress, statutory damages of “not less than $10,000,” and attorney’s fees.
The legislature and elected leadership of Texas, in its infinite wisdom, has taken it upon itself to exert its influence abroad.
Goliad was the second Texas county to pass such a law, which slowly spread around the state from small counties to larger cities like Lubbock in West Texas. They are questionably constitutional, and difficult to imagine being enforced, and thus may be easy to dismiss. But they’re backed by powerful forces in the state—especially the right-wing legal activist Jonathan Mitchell, who earlier this year began attempting to question women under oath who have had abortions beyond Texas’s borders. The goal is intimidation: to create a patchwork of counties and municipalities where seeking legal abortions, even outside of Texas, creates legal risk.
And the goal is, in turn, to create pressure on the Republican legislature to act, even beyond what they’ve already done in the name of the right to life. The state of Texas, with its expansive police forces and activist attorney general, would have the actual resources to pursue those who use Texas roads to seek abortions across state lines.
There’s precedent for this. Nearly a third of Texas counties have declared themselves “Second Amendment sanctuaries,” where federal gun regulations the locals perceive to be unconstitutional are declared to have no force of law. A good idea, said state lawmakers. Pressure built, and eventually Gov. Greg Abbott signed the Second Amendment Sanctuary State Act, which barred state agencies and police from assisting in the enforcement of any federal gun control law passed after January 19, 2021.
But most of all, it’s the legal reasoning in the travel bans that is most worth paying attention to. In a way, Goliad was offering an inversion of the interstate commerce clause, the constitutional provision that gives Congress broad powers to regulate the economy. Because Congress regulates trade between the states and its cities, its regulations must also apply to states and cities. Goliad reasons in reverse. Because it has jurisdiction over short stretches of highway that in turn connect to every road in the nation, Goliad claims a kind of national jurisdiction.
This may seem nonsensical, but it is an increasingly important part of how politics works in Texas. The Lone Star State has been subject to one-party rule since 2003, when Republicans finally took control of the Texas House. For most of the next 20 years—even as the state’s voters drifted slowly back to the Democratic Party—the Republican Party has moved sharply to the right. Texas Republicans have been efficient and unnervingly extreme, leaving little for the GOP to run on come election time.
But because Texas sits at the crossroads of so many nationally contested issues, the same way that the city of Goliad sits at the crossroads of state highways 59 and 183, the legislature and elected leadership of Texas, in its infinite wisdom, has taken it upon itself to exert its influence abroad. Standing up to tyrannical outsiders, after all, plays well at the ballot box. You may not be interested in messing with Texas, as the saying goes, but Texas will mess with you.
TEXAS LEADERS AND LAWMAKERS HAVE TAKEN so many aggressive actions against other governments and private citizens in other states in the last five years that it is difficult to organize them into coherent categories. They run the gamut from the silly and venal to the deadly serious.
With increasing regularity, Texas is launching direct challenges to the constitutional order. This January, Abbott ordered state troops and police to seize control of Shelby Park in the border town of Eagle Pass. He evicted the federal Border Patrol from the park, which contained the one usable boat ramp in the area. He fenced off the park with concertina wire and dared President Biden to send in his own troops. The Biden administration sued, and the Supreme Court ordered that federal officials could cut the wire, but Texas refused to let them in. (Amid this posturing, at least three migrants drowned in the Rio Grande.) The crisis only abated when the Mexican government began applying heavy coercive pressure to steer migrants away from Eagle Pass. In a sense, Abbott’s brinkmanship worked—though he would surely have preferred to extend the crisis.
On the other hand, you have cases like state Attorney General Ken Paxton’s 2020 crusade against the Gunnison County, Colorado, Department of Health and Human Services. In the early days of the pandemic, Gunnison tried to kick out nonresidents who were potentially bringing COVID to its many vacation homes. This included Robert McCarter, a Dallas businessman who owned a lake house in the county and had given Paxton more than $250,000 in campaign donations. Paxton’s office leapt into action, demanding a change of course and threatening to bring the state’s full might to the Rockies—until the county gave McCarter a waiver and allowed him to stay.
In between challenging long-standing federal immigration law and the health system of a county with a population of around 17,000 runs the full spectrum of Texas-sized hostility. Many of the most successful bids to exert the state’s will on others have come from the governor’s office. Abbott has access to substantial discretionary funds and men with guns. He proved in Eagle Pass he could convert those two resources into political capital. Defying the federal government was only the first step. The Department of Public Safety, which administers the state police, was run by a longtime Abbott crony: It maintained a public relations division that was effectively an arm of the Abbott campaign.
ERIC GAY/AP PHOTO
In January, Gov. Greg Abbott evicted federal Border Patrol from a park in Eagle Pass and fenced it off with concertina wire.
With endless footage of lethal obstacles in the river and state military equipment built up at the border, Abbott was able to put himself in the news more frequently than he ever had in his nine years in office. At a press conference on the river in February, 14 Republican governors made the pilgrimage to give their support to Abbott—paying fealty to a man who had never before, despite his long tenure, been considered a first-rank Republican governor or contender for higher office.
By far the most successful of Abbott’s stunts has been his migrant busing program. Texas has spent $230 million and counting on running charter buses with at least 120,000 border-crossers to blue cities and blue states. For the governor, it has been worth every penny. He derives political capital not only from the perception that he is ridding the state of undesirables—many of whom appreciate the free bus ticket—but also in creating chaos in blue cities. The anguished complaints of New York City Mayor Eric Adams are among the greatest political gifts Abbott has received.
But the success of these measures goes beyond the direct policy impact and the elevation of Abbott’s profile—and even the manner in which it centered core Republican issues in an election year. Abbott was offering policy innovations, drawing in other red states to take a harder line. Some states may be “laboratories of democracy,” as Justice Louis Brandeis said. But Texas, as the political writer Molly Ivins declared, is the “national laboratory for bad government.”
Republican governors who wanted their own political capital emulated his example. Multiple states sent their own troops to bolster the Texans in Eagle Pass. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis tried to one-up Abbott by flying migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. But it’s never enough. As press attention declined, Abbott was asked by right-wing gadfly Dana Loesch what else the state could do to up the stakes. The governor declared, almost regretfully, that Texas had done everything they could besides open fire. It was hard not to wonder if that might be coming next.
OTHER TEXAS POLITICIANS WRING POLITICAL CAPITAL out of measures that aren’t successful at all. In 2021, the state legislature banned California tech companies from discriminating against conservatives by censoring their social media posts. In testimony before committees, tech representatives mostly seemed confused. (The law is currently blocked in the courts.) Paxton sued in federal court to overturn the 2020 election. This was as poorly executed as it was reprehensible, a hallmark of Paxton’s efforts more generally. In November, alleging that a Seattle children’s hospital was providing care to transgender Texans remotely, Paxton sued to obtain their patient records. Five months later, he quietly dropped the case.
Another set of initiatives relies on the economic power of the state to coerce private companies. While Paxton has done some work on this, the key actor is most often Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who as the president of the Texas Senate lacks Abbott’s firepower but has a fine control over policy and a keen understanding of the needs of the donor class. On several occasions—most notably, a strange, slightly manic tirade against Fort Worth–based American Airlines in 2021—Patrick has pressured large companies in Texas to keep quiet on social issues if they want to be heard in his Senate.
But Patrick’s strongest interventions have involved so-called ESG (environmental, social, and governance) investing strategies. For several years, large New York financial institutions like JPMorgan Chase and BlackRock have proclaimed their desire to shift their investment portfolios in the direction of environmental sustainability and social responsibility. Even if this was window dressing, it was taken by the Texas oil and gas industry, which still controls much of the legislature, as an existential threat.
Texas could not pass a law mandating that BlackRock subsidize carbon production, though it surely would have liked to. But it had some leverage: its enormous state investment and pension funds. The Texas Permanent School Fund, which subsidizes public schools, controls some $56 billion in assets: The 347 retirement funds overseen by the Texas Pension Review Board total some $394 billion in assets. In 2021 and 2023, Patrick led Texas to pass laws that barred state money from being invested with firms the state judged insufficiently invested in the carbon economy.
STEVE MARCUS, BRYAN OLIN DOZIER, DELCIA LOPEZ/AP PHOTO
The state did this despite protests from pension fund managers that it would lose them money, which would ultimately have to instead be extracted from employees or expended by the state. During last year’s legislative session, Amy Bishop, executive director of the $42 billion Texas County and District Retirement System, testified that she anticipated a $6 billion shortfall over the next decade from not being able to work with a widening set of state-proscribed investment firms. The state tightened the restrictions anyway. On March 20, the Permanent School Fund announced that it was withdrawing $8.5 billion from BlackRock management.
That’s a lot of money for Texas, yet a piddling amount for BlackRock, which reports more than $10 trillion in assets. But a week after the state began pulling out, the firm’s CEO Larry Fink issued his annual chairman’s letter, which seemed to confirm at least a tonal shift at the company as a result of increasing political pressure. He now spoke of “energy pragmatism.” Instead of decarbonization, the company aimed to support a responsible energy “transition.” At a potentially significant cost to its own employees and taxpayers, the legislature appeared to be bending the direction of some of the world’s largest companies.
It was a strange echo of another period in Texas history, where the legislature attempted to hold Northeastern financiers to account. At the end of the 19th century, a very poor Texas tried to shield its mostly agrarian population from predatory lending and business practices. The Railroad Commission, founded in 1891, regulated interstate shipping rates. It was soon given oversight of the nascent oil industry, and enacted rules to keep the money flowing from the gushers at home. In 1905, the legislature created a state banking system, complete with its own predecessor of the FDIC, intended to cater to the needs of those with no access to the national lenders.
Then, as now, state financiers understood that their role was to counteract national economic forces for the good of the state. But where the impetus in 1890 was to marshal state resources to broaden the economic base, it is now to consume state resources to maintain the pools of capital claimed by the very richest people in the state—who are, of course, well represented among the political donor class.
IN SOME WAYS, WE’VE COME FULL CIRCLE. An earlier collection of the state’s most important leaders—with the blessing of the legislature—once issued a proclamation to explain why Texas needed to take new and unorthodox measures to maintain its rights. Those measures were necessary, the Texans said, because they could no longer win elections at the federal level. Texas was part of a “hopeless minority.” The opposition—the “controlling majority” of the federal government, backstopped by stupid do-gooders in “Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania”—was inimical to core Texas values, and wholly committed to destroying them from within, spreading seditious ideas and sending money to sway minds.
Worse still, the knaves running the federal government had failed in their most basic duty: to secure the border. The Beltway class had “failed to protect the lives and property of the people of Texas … against the murderous forays of banditti from the neighboring territory of Mexico.” The state had long had to expend its own funds to do so, and Congress wouldn’t pay them back.
Maybe this sounds like it came out last week, but I’m talking about Texas’s 1861 secession declaration. Banditti aside, the loudest complaint in the declaration is that Northern states had failed to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. Texas didn’t just want to preserve slavery—it wanted Vermont to enforce slavery. Having been denied the right to extend Texas to the Canadian border, it seceded at the urging of the state’s wealthiest planters and least responsible politicians, knocking off its own elected governor by a coup d’état.
Goliad County’s effort to effectively make legal abortion in other jurisdictions illegal bears echoes of this, and it is hard not to hear those historical echoes elsewhere. This isn’t the 1860s, of course. Abbott and company are playing a dangerous game, riling up the most extreme factions in the state and stirring memories of taking up arms against federal power. Bluster or not, it would be quite easy for it to tip into conflagration.
But this constitutional tightrope walk is embedded into the structure of Texas politics. The state’s most hard-right politicians, the ones responsible for the dumbest and most unwise provocations, belong to a rump minority of the Republican caucus that is able to exercise controlling power over the majority party. It is a very particular kind of polarization that is unique to Texas. Some 3 percent of the state votes in the Republican primary, and that 3 percent has effective control of the ninth-largest economy in the world.
That control can feel like a permanent feature of Texas politics, and it may live for a while yet. But it will end someday. In the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump won the state by just 5.6 points, a tighter margin than Ohio. In 2018, Sen. Ted Cruz won re-election by just 2.6 points. Both Cruz and Trump are in single-digit fights this year. Polls have shown at least a plurality of Texans thinking the state is on the wrong track for a long time, while a strong majority support abortion rights. (They also support busing migrants out of state, but with less of a dominant majority—52 percent—than you might think.)
When general elections become competitive again, Texas may become less of a hothouse for stupid ideas. And Gunnison County, Colorado, Seattle, and the banditti of Mexico will be able to breathe a little easier.
