State attorneys general are supposed to serve important functions in the daily business of the states: representing the government in civil suits, enforcing laws to prevent corporations from screwing over workers and consumers, and advising the state government on the legality of proposed laws and policies. At their best, these offices step in to protect regular people from being harmed by the wealthy and powerful.

But what if these offices could be weaponized to achieve ends not possible through the regular democratic process? This was one of the Federalist Society’s key insights as it set out to capture the judicial system several decades ago. The conservative legal movement identified attorney general offices as underused tools for achieving its policy goals through litigation, and entities like the Federalist Society made filling attorney general offices a key part of its strategy.

Now that effort is bearing fruit. Starting during the Obama administration, but ramping up particularly under President Joe Biden, state attorneys general have brought an unprecedented number of federal cases against Democratic administration policies, including efforts to block student aid relief, to ensure the safety of transgender students, and to protect the environment. The purpose of these lawsuits is to take policy outside the elected branches and send them to the more conservative-friendly arena of the unaccountable federal courts. But more recently, Republican attorneys general have turned toward usurping the power of local governments, too, to ensure that conservatives retain total control of policy in red states.

Chief among the attorneys general pushing this strategy is Texas’s Ken Paxton, who has filed dozens of lawsuits challenging policies passed by Democratic-controlled local governments. In the leadup to the 2024 election, Paxton’s office sued some of the largest counties in Texas over their voter registration efforts, arguing that the counties’ plans would lead to voting by undocumented immigrants. Paxton has castigated the Biden administration’s “open border policies” for having “saddled Texas—and the entire country—with a wave of illegal immigration.” In filings and warning letters, Paxton frames the issue in stark terms familiar to anyone fighting them out in the political arena, describing a state grappling with “ballooning noncitizen populations.” Already, these lawsuits have prompted Democratic officials to rescind voter registration initiatives, as well as driven worries about vote suppression of minority populations.