The most important legal development from the midterm elections happened in Texas. Nope, I’m not talking about the election of James Talarico, or the Democrats’ newfound power to block Donald Trump’s judicial appointments. That stuff matters, of course, but the single biggest change to what happens in the courts over the next two years probably comes down to Democrat Nathan Johnson, the new Attorney General for the state of Texas.

The Texas AG’s office has been ground zero for many of the most destructive legal battles Republicans have fought and largely won over the past generation. The outgoing Texas AG is the guy who lost to Talarico for Senate, Ken Paxton. Paxton has been suing abortion providers who send mifepristone (the “abortion pill”) to his state. He has attacked trans people, immigrants, and the environment. He tried to single-handedly block Joe Biden’s agenda from ever being enacted in Texas, and has generally been a despicable menace who uses the law to promote bigotry. Paxton has been at the post since 2015. Before him, the Texas AG was Greg Abbott (the Texas governor who just lost to Gina Hinojosa). Before him, John Cornyn held the role; he’s the outgoing Republican Senator who Paxton beat in the primary. Cornyn replaced Democrat Dan Morales as AG in 1999. Republicans have literally controlled this post this whole century. 

What makes the person who occupies this post particularly influential is that the Texas attorney general is always backed up by the Texas solicitor general, who has the job of arguing the AG’s cases in court. The Texas AG, as opposed to the governor, is also the one who appoints the SG. Past Texas Solicitors General include Johnathan Mitchell—who is the guy who had the bright idea to set bounty hunters on abortion providers—and… Senator Ted Cruz. 

All of this matters because a disproportionate number of this Supreme Court’s worst, most corrosive cases originate in Texas. That’s because of a quirk in Texas’s judicial structure that allows for easy and flagrant judge-shopping. In other states, the initial judge presiding over a federal lawsuit is chosen by lottery from among the available judges in the district where the lawsuit is filed. In Texas, the presiding judge is whoever happens to run the courthouse in the place where the case is filed. That means that the Texas AG can pick the judge who will rule on any given case by filing the case in the right mailbox. For the past few years, the judge of choice for culture-war issues has been the “emperor of Amarillo,” the reactionary misogynist Matthew Kacsmaryk. For the past 20 years, the judge of choice for immigration issues has been reactionary bigot Reed O’Connor. 

Sometimes, a case might end there, with a favorable ruling from one of these handpicked judges. But if the losing party appeals—and, the Texas AG and SG are often counting on this—they can defend their cases in front of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Fifth Circuit is the most conservative appellate court in the country, by some margin. It is full of people openly auditioning for Supreme Court appointments, and in the Trump era that audition has devolved into judges ruling in the most insane way possible. Fifth Circuit judges like James C. Ho, Stuart Kyle Duncan, and Andy Oldham are truly some of the worst people the system has to offer. 

From there, once the next inevitable appeal arrives, it’s a straight shot to the Supreme Court, where whatever legal monstrosity the Texas AG cooked up is often enshrined into national law by the six Republican justices. What starts in Texas rarely stays there.

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This is why replacing the Texas AG with a Democrat is so important. It stops a bunch of lawsuits before they even start. It greatly diminishes the evil the people on the Fifth Circuit can do. It deprives the conservatives on the Supreme Court of some of the cases they need if they want to change the law. Other Republican Attorneys General who survived the blue tsunami will surely try to pick up the slack for Texas, but because other states lack the unique judge-shopping structure available in Texas, those surviving AGs are unlikely to be as effective as the Texas AG has been. Moreover, as Ian Millhiser points out, the Attorney General offices in other states (like Louisiana and Mississippi, which are the other two states in the Fifth Circuit) are fundamentally smaller than Texas and don’t have as much money. “[T]hey will likely only have the resources to bring a fraction of the number of partisan lawsuits filed by Paxton.”

You don’t have to take our words for it. Just listen to conservative legal commentator Josh Blackman bemoaning the loss of the position in a post-election article in Reason:

I would suspect that all of the conservative strategic litigation cases brought by Attorney General Paxton will be dismissed. Indeed, it is conceivable that the new Texas Attorney General would not defend the Texas Ten Commandments Law if cert is granted… The Texas Attorney General will also not bring original jurisdiction actions before the Supreme Court of Texas. Going forward, all of the strategic forums in Texas will be severely underutilized.

To de-jargonize some of the gobbledygook: “original jurisdiction actions” refer to cases where Texas sues some other state for, say, “election fraud”; “strategic forums” refer to the judge-shopping Texas AGs traditionally do; and “strategic litigation” is whatever anti-democratic, cultural nonsense people like Josh Blackman can think-up next. As Sean Rankin, head of the Democratic Attorneys General Association, put it in an interview with Politico, “We took the head of the snake.”

With that head gone, the Texas AG will no longer be the force for pure evil that it has been. There’s a lot of bad stuff the office will cease to do. The other side of the coin is the good stuff the AG can do. Nathan Johnson has already said he will end the out-of-state prosecutions of abortion providers and restore a “respect for the rule of law,” which was something that was severely lacking under his predecessor. But I will dare to hope for a little more than a mere restoration of respect. Texas is the corporate home of a number of companies that haven’t been regulated or investigated at the state level during this century, among them: ExxonMobile, McKesson Pharmaceuticals, AT&T, Oracle… and the entire Elon Musk cinematic universe, including Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter. 

That’s right, Nathan Johnson is poised to become Elon Musk’s worst nightmare: a Democrat with jurisdiction. Musk and his companies fled California after Tesla was sued for civil rights violations there. Do we think he stopped allegedly violating workers’ civil rights when he got to Texas? I don’t think so, and I bet Johnson doesn’t think so either. The judge-shopping door swings both ways, and all Johnson needs is one favorable district court judge in, say, Austin, and he can haul Musk before a jury of his new neighbors. 

Think about all the work New York Attorney General Tish James (who won a third term last week) has done trying to hold the Trump crime family accountable. Think about all the work Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has done trying to hold police accountable. Think about all the work California Attorney General Rob Bonta (who just won a second term) has done trying to hold ICE accountable. Now think about the fact that we added new Democratic AGs in Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, and Kansas (defeating Republican Kris Kobach who would have been the worst AG in the country if Ken Paxton did not exist). 

And now we’re adding Johnson in Elon Musk’s home state of Texas to the illustrious array of Democratic crime-fighters. This, my friends, is a full on “Avengers, Assemble” moment—and they are “on your left.”