In most ways, the year 1998 doesn’t seem like the distant past. Christopher Nolan released a movie. Willie Nelson became a senior citizen. You could visit Google.com and search the internet. But when a little-known 46-year-old Texas Supreme Court justice named John Cornyn ran for state attorney general that year, he might as well have been campaigning in prehistoric times. The origins of our current era were faintly discernible, like aurochs painted in the Lascaux caves, but, in a fundamental way, the job that Cornyn sought would be almost unrecognizable to a Texan today.
The most consequential difference was the position’s partisan goals. Cornyn was a lifelong Republican, seeking to become the state’s first Republican attorney general since Reconstruction. But even in a hotly contested GOP primary, Cornyn liked to talk about his legal acumen rather than trumpet any plans to fight for conservative policy aims. “We need to have someone who is a real lawyer and not just a politician,” Cornyn said at the time. When his Supreme Court record of sometimes upholding legislation disliked by conservatives became a campaign issue, Cornyn outlined his legal philosophy simply: “I do not agree . . . that if you do not like the law, you should strike it down.”
Cornyn won the party’s nomination with this decidedly technocratic rhetoric, then prevailed in the general election. As attorney general he prioritized the collection of child support payments (one of the AG’s core functions), created the role of solicitor general to more effectively argue state cases in the appellate courts, and generally sought, he said, to “professionalize” the office and “recruit the best and brightest.” His agency wasn’t politics-free. He personally argued a case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in which he unsuccessfully defended the rights of the Santa Fe Independent School District to have student-led prayers at its high school football games. (A Texas Monthly piece from this era wondered if Cornyn was “playing politics with the law at the expense of the public interest.”) But Cornyn said he saw the job primarily as “representing our client, which is the State of Texas and the state agencies, to the best of our ability.”
Cornyn, now serving out the final few months of his 24 years in the United States Senate, is proud of his time as attorney general, and he still thinks state attorneys general should execute the office as he did. “Well, this won’t surprise you,” Cornyn told me when we spoke this past summer. “I’d like to see it return to its traditional role.”
But Cornyn also knows his era is long past. Over the two and a half decades since he left the position for the U.S. Senate, his successors, Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton, have steered the Texas attorney general’s office ever more aggressively toward the front lines of partisan conflicts. Abbott began to sue the Obama administration so regularly that he famously quipped, “I go into the office. I sue the federal government. And then I go home.” And Paxton turned Abbott’s single-mindedness into a kind of right-wing-base-affirming performance art, finding a way to file a lawsuit (or issue a press release) over seemingly every hot-button right-wing cause—transgender medical care, abortion pill access, election integrity, immigration enforcement. (Paxton even sued the makers of Tylenol for “deceptively marketing” to pregnant women after President Trump hyped a spurious claim that the painkiller causes autism.)
Now Paxton is leaving the office, and State Senator Mayes Middleton of Galveston, the Republican nominee, has promised to out-Paxton Paxton. He has revealed that he sees the office as mainly engaged in an ideological crusade, saying, “The most important thing in the attorney general’s role is defeating the left.”
The transformation of the office drives Cornyn a little crazy, at least as much as the studiously measured senator will admit to such things. “There are plenty of lawsuits out there, and there are plenty of good lawyers who can file lawsuits against social media companies, pharmaceutical companies, and others,” he told me in his deliberate baritone. “But I have to believe that the attorney general focusing on those sort of high-profile political-social issues comes at a loss to their representing the state and state agencies as their number one job.”
What does the Texas attorney general’s office do exactly? What should its number one job actually be? The state’s 1876 constitution defined the role narrowly: The attorney general represents the state in “all suits and pleas” involving state interests in the Texas Supreme Court, and he or she takes “such action in the courts as may be proper and necessary” to prevent corporations from exercising any power not authorized by law. Nearly every word of that definition is still on the books. (The biggest change has been the removal of the 1876 constitution’s hard cap on the attorney general’s annual pay at $2,000.)
Although the Texas attorney general is sometimes referred to as the state’s top cop, the office, in fact, has a limited law enforcement role, mostly that of supporting local district attorneys, who are the officials actually tasked with criminal prosecutions. Instead, the AG oversees an office with a hodgepodge of functions. If you’re the victim of a scam or deceptive marketing, you can go to the office’s website, file a consumer complaint, and one of the four thousand or so staffers should at least take a look. If you think your kid’s public school is violating a state law, you can report that to the office too. The list goes on. There are currently 38 divisions, covering everything from cybercrime and antitrust law to Medicaid fraud, which makes sense given that the “general” in “attorney general” is an adjective, as in “not confined by specialization or careful limitation,” not a noun for top military commander—although many attorneys general have been happy not to correct the error.
For much of Texas’s history, you could have accurately thought of the AG as a statewide version of a country lawyer operating from a small office on Main Street with his name on the door. By the time Cornyn won his election in 1998, the office wasn’t quite so sleepy. His immediate predecessor, Dan Morales, a Democrat, had successfully sued the tobacco industry for public health costs related to smoking, helping to set the stage for a massive multistate settlement that showed how much more powerful states could be when they banded together.
When Greg Abbott took over the attorney general’s office from Cornyn at the end of 2002, he steered it in an overtly partisan direction. One of his first moves was hiring a 32-year-old former Bush-Cheney campaign policy adviser named Ted Cruz as his solicitor general. As Cruz would later recount, Abbott told him, “Look across the country. If there are conservative principles we can fight and defend, if we can make a difference defending the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, go do it.”
Abbott and Cruz were limited, though, in their ability to sue the federal government at first. The U.S. Supreme Court had held that a state needed to show it faced “actual or imminent” injury, among other criteria, to bring a federal lawsuit. In 2007 that changed. Massachusetts sued the George W. Bush administration’s Environmental Protection Agency for failing to enforce climate change regulations. In siding with Massachusetts in a 5–4 decision, the court’s majority found that the state had a lower threshold for bringing suit against the federal government than another plaintiff would. Massachusetts, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, had “special solicitude” to challenge the federal government. All the other states did too.
It had been the Supreme Court’s liberals who had embraced this new doctrine of special solicitude, but back in Texas, Abbott was eager to test what it meant for conservative causes. Once Barack Obama succeeded Bush in the White House, Abbott began to regularly sue the federal government.
But Abbott, who, like Cornyn, had served on the state Supreme Court, still felt beholden to the constitutional responsibilities of the AG’s office, including defending state entities. When two students who were denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin brought a lawsuit over its affirmative action policies, Abbott’s office came to the school’s defense, even though the policy was anathema to conservatives.
Abbott’s successor, Ken Paxton, had none of his hang-ups about defending state agencies with politically inconvenient policies. As documented by The Texas Tribune and ProPublica, Paxton has repeatedly declined to represent Texas entities that have been sued by conservative groups. Meanwhile, he has used consumer-protection laws to demand records from voter-registration groups and nonprofits that offered services to immigrants and refugees. He sued local governments, particularly in Texas’s large Democratic-voting cities, over everything from plastic-bag fees to enforcement of marijuana laws.
Paxton was so aggressive in his use of the attorney general’s office that he forced the U.S. Supreme Court to grapple with the limits of special solicitude. When he led a multistate coalition in suing Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Georgia over the 2020 election results, the court, in an unsigned order, rejected Paxton’s motion, finding that “Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections.” Three years later, when Paxton joined Louisiana’s AG in suing the Biden administration over its immigration-enforcement priorities, the justices, in an 8–1 decision, ruled against the states, finding that they couldn’t simply sue their way out of every policy they didn’t like. “The Constitution affords federal courts considerable power,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in a concurring opinion, “but it does not establish ‘government by lawsuit.’ ”
In a different political reality, perhaps, such words from a preeminent conservative jurists might have chastened the Texas attorney general and his potential successors. But Paxton had made himself a Republican star by suing the federal government, and that kept him politically viable even as he faced more than a decade’s worth of scandals, an indictment, alleged extramarital affairs, whistleblower complaints, and an impeachment. Even if Paxton’s record of legal accomplishments in office was a mixed bag—filled with more high-profile press releases than consequential victories—he proved emphatically that being a deeply partisan attorney general was a winning political strategy.
No one knows this better than Cornyn, who lost his Senate seat when he was defeated by Paxton in this year’s Republican primary runoff. “I think there’s a huge temptation from a political standpoint to follow the Paxton model,” Cornyn told me. “There’s no question that Paxton’s advanced his political career by being seen as a warrior on behalf of a variety of causes, whether they’re related to MAGA or whatever.”
Cornyn told me he hadn’t talked to Middleton, the Republican nominee, about how he would run the AG’s office, but Middleton has made his plans quite clear, setting out a list of stridently partisan priorities. He plans to use the office to “defeat these atheist precedents that have stopped prayer in school.” He has pledged, “on day one,” to initiate an investigation of the 96-year-old billionaire financier George Soros, who gives lavishly to liberal causes, “for the crimes that I believe he has committed against Texas.” He has also promised to investigate Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Middleton graduated from law school, but he’s barely practiced, having spent his career as a state representative and senator and an executive of his family’s oil and gas firm. This has caused some grousing, even from his ideological allies, who watched as he deployed around $17 million of his own money to defeat Republican primary opponents with more-traditional attorney general credentials.
But his lack of experience may not matter much. As Adam Piper, the executive director of the Republican Attorneys General Association, told The Texas Tribune, the Texas attorney general’s office is the “largest legal power in the conservative movement, nationally, period, end of story.”
It may be too big and too politically consequential to fail, with plenty of conservative lawyers ready to lend a hand. Cornyn’s 1998 campaign remark that the attorney general needs to be a “real lawyer” may very well turn out to be just another relic of a bygone time and a deeply changed office.
There is, of course, nothing in the Texas constitution mandating that the Texas attorney general be a conservative. What would it look like if a Democrat were at the helm? When I met Nathan Johnson, Middleton’s opponent in the general election, he told me he was hoping to rescue the office from its obsession with partisan warfare. Johnson is a third-term state senator from Dallas whose background is as a commercial litigator, and he said he was trying to bake a less bellicose approach into the way his staffers talked. “I have a list of words not to use in my campaign,” Johnson told me as we sat in his campaign office in Austin. “And one of those words is ‘fight.’ ”
Forcing your campaign staff to avoid using the word “fight” may be one of the most counterintuitive and potentially self-defeating acts a politician could come up with in 2026. The word is everywhere. Progressives want to “fight the oligarchy,” conservatives want to “fight the radical left.” But Johnson thought taking the temperature down a few notches might make for a better pitch.
“If I’m a successful attorney general, there will be less fighting,” he said. “One of my goals is to break it up, I guess. Come in here and separate the fighters.”
To do that, Johnson imagines an office that is something like what Cornyn envisioned, albeit with more consumer-focused lawsuits and a populist bent. But he also knows that putting the genie back in the bottle won’t be easy. Texas isn’t the only state with a powerful attorney general, and Democratic AGs around the country have been zealous in suing the federal government under President Trump. Much as Abbott pushed back on the Obama administration’s immigration policies, Democratic attorneys general have sued over the current administration’s executive order to end birthright citizenship, over restrictions on mail-in voting, over its sweeping tariff regime. At a time of congressional gridlock and an ever-more-powerful executive branch, state attorneys general are indispensable for the party that’s out of power in Washington.
“I do think this office has become—I hate these military analogies—but it is deep in the partisan battles that are ripping the country apart,” Johnson told me. “And to some extent, if I’m the next attorney general, I will be in those battles. And even if I don’t particularly want to be partisan, I’m going to be up against a hyper-partisan machine.” Johnson knew that meant he was going to have to break his own rule, a concession to the reality of how much the position has changed since Cornyn’s time. “If I have to get in some fights on the way,” Johnson said, “I will.”
This article originally appeared in the September 2026 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “How the Attorney General Got This Way.” Subscribe today.
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