Energized by Next Trump Term, Red States Move Agendas Further Right

The Washington Post / Molly Hennessy-Fiske

18:02 JST, December 14, 2024

Red state leaders emboldened by Donald Trump’s presidential victory are not waiting for him to take office to advance far more conservative agendas at home.

Idaho lawmakers want to allow school staff to carry concealed firearms without prior approval and parents to sue districts in library and curriculum disputes. Lawmakers in Oklahoma plan to further restrict abortion by limiting the emergency exceptions and to require the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public schools, while their counterparts in Arkansas are moving to create the felony offense of “vaccine harm,” which could make pharmaceutical companies or their executive officers potentially criminally liable.

But few states have bigger, more aggressive plans than Texas. Ahead of their biennial session, which begins Jan. 14, the Republican legislators who control both the House and Senate have proposed a multitude of measures that would push the state further right.

Migrants are a particular focus, with bills to create a “Texas border protection unit” and to repeal in-state tuition for undocumented students, requiring colleges to notify law enforcement if they learn a student is undocumented. They also would require state police to DNA-test migrants taken into custody, allow troopers to return undocumented immigrants to Mexico if they are seen entering Texas illegally, fingerprint and track migrant children in a database, and bar immigrants who are in the country illegally from accessing public legal services.

“Red state legislatures and governors are champing at the bit,” said Craig DeRoche, a former Michigan House speaker who is now president of the influential conservative Family Policy Alliance. The group has chapters in 40 states where, he said, conservatives are sending a message to likely members of the incoming Trump administration on a variety of issues: “Don’t fix it there. Send it back to us so we can fix it here.”

“There’s going to be an extraordinary accountability. And red state governors and legislatures are going to lead on that,” DeRoche said.

Of 27 states with Republican governors, 23 are backed by GOP legislative majorities, all of which will reconvene in the new year. Republicans made gains in the Michigan and Minnesota Houses this election, breaking Democrats’ trifecta control, and they hold a supermajority in Kansas that will allow them to override any veto by Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat.

“The alignment of a Trump-Vance administration and the beginning of legislative sessions is a looming perfect storm of conservative policies in red states,” said Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, a legal group that has marshaled more than 800 lawyers to counter an anticipated onslaught of conservative legal battles on multiple fronts, from reproductive health to labor rights, free speech and public education.

Still, it’s not clear where or how or how fast Trump will try to capitalize on his state allies once he’s back in the White House. “We don’t know if they will target communities in red states quicker than in blue states,” Perryman said. What she and others do know: that those allies hope to find much success given the momentum of Trump’s win, not just with new proposals but also with some that previously fell short.

Simone Leiro, spokeswoman for the Democratic-aligned States Project, sees GOP lawmakers already pursuing two types of legislation: those that fan the culture wars and those that give more power to corporations. “It feels like they can get away with a lot more without scrutiny,” she said Wednesday.

Nowhere is GOP activism more visible than in Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott hosted Trump’s incoming “border czar,” Tom Homan, last month at a state-run base established just minutes from where many migrants cross the Rio Grande. Homan called Operation Lone Star, Texas’s $11 billion border enforcement program, a “model” for national immigration enforcement.

Since the Nov. 5 election, Texas has added more barbed wire along the border and buoy barriers in the river. A state police unit patrols daily on horseback. Abbott has asked the legislature for another $2.8 billion for the program in 2025.

“We’re going to be doing more and faster than anything that’s ever been done to regain control of our border, restore order in our communities, and also identify, locate and deport criminals in the United States of America who have come across the border,” he said during Homan’s visit to Eagle Pass.

Florida also is certain to focus on migrant issues, with Gov. Ron DeSantis requesting $5 million from state legislators to continue transporting undocumented immigrants there to Massachusetts and California – a controversial program that provoked an uproar among migrant advocates.

Yet DeSantis, both before and during his own 2024 presidential bid, worked to position his state as a leader across the spectrum of deep-red issues.

He championed its near-total abortion ban, which last month narrowly survived a ballot measure asking voters to safeguard access to the procedure. And he pushed restrictions on Medicaid funding for gender-affirming care for transgender individuals. Despite the latter being blocked in federal court, conservative advocates expect like-minded states to follow Florida’s path.

In Tallahassee this year, the GOP-controlled legislature banned gender-affirming care for minors – action that was struck down on constitutional grounds. Lawmakers also voted to require public schools to teach anti-communism, which conservatives elsewhere are now trying to do. The state’s Education Department recently released a list of over 700 books banned by local districts during the past year, more than twice as many as were targeted the previous year.

“Florida has been an incubator of ideas,” said Charlie Misseijer, state policy director for Moms for Liberty, a right-wing advocacy group headquartered in Melbourne, Florida.

Misseijer is working with Moms for Liberty chapters in the Carolinas, Michigan, Pennsylvania and other states to push legislation promoting parents’ rights, including the right to sue school districts over issues such as library books they find objectionable, and “school choice” bills that allow public taxpayer money to be used by parents who want to send their children to private schools, which leaders in Texas and other states have made a priority.

“The school choice movement feels totally emboldened,” said Jon Schweppe, policy director at the American Principles Project, a Virginia-based nonprofit advocating for socially conservative causes.

After four years of being stymied by the Biden administration, whether through agency regulations or legal battles with the Justice Department, the 29 Republican state attorneys general have already begun flexing their muscles. Since Trump was elected, they have individually and in coalitions defended gun rights, blocked certain policies benefiting immigrants, and defended restrictions on gender-affirming care for minors and transgender students’ participation in girls’ and women’s sports.

The challenges around transgender rights could draw the most attention in coming months.

Last week, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in defense of a state law prohibiting transgender minors from using puberty blockers and hormones. About two dozen states ban such treatments because officials consider them risky and unproven; the high court’s conservative justices appeared ready to uphold Tennessee’s statute.

Many of the same GOP-led states are suing the Biden administration over recent changes to federal Title IX provisions aiming to protect LGBTQ+ students from discrimination in schools. Their effort now will be easier: Trump and his allies were unequivocal before the election that he would roll back such protections.

“We’re not going to let it happen,” Trump declared in reference to transgender athletes playing youth and college sports.

The courts have also become more conservative since Trump was last in office, in part because of the 245 judges he appointed to the federal courts during his first term. Three joined the Supreme Court.

The Justice Department is sure to have a much different relationship with red states. The president-elect’s pick for attorney general, Pam Bondi, is a former Florida attorney general who this year chaired the legal arm of the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. And his pick to lead the department’s civil rights division, San Francisco attorney Harmeet K. Dhillon, founded a group that has advanced anti-transgender cases.

Matt Sharp of Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal advocacy group based in Arizona, foresees Republican attorneys general in many states changing tactics after Trump’s inauguration. Their approach, he said, “may shift from these attorneys general challenging federal rules and policies, to the Trump administration appealing those policies and rolling them back.”

Doing so will free up conservative states to move forward even more. “We’ve seen them going hand in hand and will continue to,” he said.