Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what’s goin’ down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin’ gets done and where the good shepherd grieves.
We begin in Texas, Patient Zero for all bad conservative ideas, where Attorney General Ken (Clean Getaway) Paxton is presently suing the NCAA for its stance on trans athletes in collegiate sports. This week, in another filing, Paxton has announced he intends to extend the reach of small government into the human genome. Paxton, because he is a raving transphobe, believes that NCAA is not obeying the president’s executive order on women’s sports like every right-thinking raving transphobe should.
This whole frenzy is based on one trans citizen who plays volleyball for the women’s team at a school in the Mountain West Conference. Even Paxton admits in his latest filing that he has no evidence of other trans athletes anywhere else. From the filing itself:
Although it is impossible to know the full extent to which biological men are competing in the NCAA’s “women’s” sports categories based on the NCAA’s lack of sex-screening procedures, upon information and belief, Blair Fleming is not the only one. Biological men have been, and will continue to, surreptitiously participate in “women’s” sports until the NCAA implements a procedure to screen the sex of student-athletes.
At which point Paxton runs his freak flag all the way up the pole.
The second avenue through which biological men will continue to participate in NCAA “women’s” sports categories is the NCAA’s loose definition of “sex.” According to the Amended TEP, a student-athlete’s sex is whatever “designation doctors assign to infants at birth, which is marked on their birth records.” Not only does this definition stand in stark contrast to President Trump’s February 5, 2025 EO (defining sex as unchangeable and determined at conception), but it leaves ample opportunity for biological men to alter their birth records and participate in women’s sports. Indeed, 26 states and the District of Columbia allow a person to alter the sex designation on their birth certificate purely through administrative procedures.
States’ rights, people.
In the steamy Freudian rain forest of Ken Paxton’s mind, men everywhere are changing their birth documents in order to dominate women’s volleyball across this great land and, ipso facto and res ipsa loquitur, the NCAA is committing fraud. His solution? The NCAA should be made to conduct genetic testing of all 520,000-plus of its athletes.
For the foregoing reasons, and because the NCAA is engaging in, has engaged in, and is about to engage in, deceptive trade practices in violation of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, the State prays that the Court enter a temporary injunction ordering the NCAA to immediately begin screening the sex of student athletes (such as by screening for presence of the SRY gene) and prohibiting all males (as defined by President Trump’s EO) from participating in “women’s” sports categories, or alternatively, requiring the NCAA and its affiliates to immediately stop using the terms “women,” “female,” or “girl” (or any iterations of such terms) in connection with the advertising and marketing of its “women’s” sports teams, categories, competitions, tournaments, and championships, and for all other relief to which the State may be justly entitled.
(The SRY gene is responsible for male sex development.)
Besides being incredibly intrusive, and despite being nothing more than the outward manifestation of a manufactured paranoid frenzy, this testing will be prohibitively expensive. Features, people, not a bug.
We move along to Idaho, where much of the citizenry has allowed their brains to secede from the Union. Now it has come to general attention that doing the ol’ “Sieg Heil” has become all the rage in certain exercises in public rhetoric. However, even in Idaho, there seem to be limits. From Idaho News6:
In a widely shared video on Reddit, Hill was seen issuing two salutes in front of a screen showing President Donald Trump—which has been likened to the Nazi salute. Hill issued several apologies since the incident but formally resigned on Monday afternoon, just a few days after the video was initially posted.
Look, people. Just don’t do the Hitler salute, in any context whatsoever, but particularly not in homage to our current president. Christamighty, can’t we at least agree on that? Or, if not, just cancel Memorial Day?
We skip on east to Indiana, where we are reminded that voter suppression never sleeps. From Bolts:
Indiana may soon make voting much tougher for college students:
Legislation banning the use of student IDs for voting passed the state Senate with near unanimous Republican support in early February and now sits with the GOP-run House.
[A student voting-registration activist] told Bolts that banning student IDs at the polls would add a significant barrier for many students who want to vote. If a student who just moved to campus before a fall election can’t vote with their university ID, and doesn’t already have another ID issued by the state of Indiana, they’d then need to trek to the closest BMV office miles from campus and supply documents that can be tricky for students to obtain—all during a busy season of classes and midterms.
Indiana would be the seventh state to require a photo ID at the polls while disallowing all student IDs, even if they’re issued by state colleges and universities, according to trackers maintained by the
Fair Elections Center and by
Voting Rights Lab. New Hampshire is
currently debating a similar move.
Moreover, it is of historical note that it was Indiana that really got the ball rolling on voter ID. In 2007, in a case out of Indiana titled Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, federal appeals court judge Richard Posner led a majority in upholding an Indiana law requiring IDs to vote. The Supreme Court upheld Posner’s decision, and that opened the floodgates. States with Republican majorities in their state governments soon began narrowing the sort of IDs they would require and began making those IDs harder and harder to obtain, especially for those likely to vote Democratic. In 2013, Posner shocked his fans by publicly denouncing his own opinion, saying flatly that the dissenters on his court had been right all along. From The New York Times:
In a new book, “Reflections on Judging,” Judge Posner, a prolific author who also teaches at the University of Chicago Law School, said, “I plead guilty to having written the majority opinion” in the case. He noted that the Indiana law in the Crawford case is “a type of law now widely regarded as a means of voter suppression rather than of fraud prevention.”
Asked whether the court had gotten its ruling wrong, Judge Posner responded: “Yes. Absolutely.” Back in 2007, he said, “there hadn’t been that much activity in the way of voter identification,” and “we weren’t really given strong indications that requiring additional voter identification would actually disenfranchise people entitled to vote.” The member of the three-judge panel who dissented from the majority decision, Terence T. Evans, “was right,” Judge Posner said.
The dissent by Judge Evans, who died in 2011, began, “Let’s not beat around the bush: The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too-thinly-veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic.”
Thanks, pal.
(The good people at Bolts give us a neat survey of eight critical voting-rights cases on which we should all keep watch this year.)
And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, whence Blog Official Seeker of Fresh Coke Zero’s Friedman of the Algarve brings us the tale of the new national order. From Oklahoma Voice:
As the Trump administration pushes for more deportations, the government has revived a long-abandoned program that lets local and state law enforcement challenge people on the street about immigration status—and possibly arrest them for deportation.
So far this week, state and county agencies in Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas have already signed up for the “task force” program that was dropped in 2012 after abuses including racial profiling were discovered, costing tens of millions in lawsuits. New Hampshire State Police will sign an agreement soon.
Make no mistake. This is a bad idea. This is a bad idea made even worse by the fact that we tried it not long ago and it proved to be a bad idea.
“They’re going to stop somebody for a routine traffic violation or loitering and ask about immigration status,” said Thomas Kennedy, a policy consultant for the Florida Immigrant Coalition, which represents 83 immigrant advocacy groups in the state.
“That’s bad for civil rights, it’s bad for our community, for trust between law enforcement and the community, for the reporting of crimes. But it also exposes municipalities and police departments to litigation,” Kennedy said.
In Arizona, Maricopa County was forced to
pay $43 million in litigation fees from lawsuits before ICE stopped its task force partnership with the county in 2009. The fallout from a 2013 federal court finding of racial profiling is
expected to boost taxpayer costs to $314 million this year.
A law that both violates civil liberties and drains the public treasury. If that isn’t the summation of American conservative governance, I don’t know what is—except, maybe, Marjorie Taylor Greene.
This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.
