In April 2024, the Biden administration cleared the way for more than 4 million low-wage workers to collect overtime pay. People earning less than $58,656 were to be paid time and a half if they worked over 40 hours a week, a shift that would put $1.5 billion into workers’ pockets, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Until Ken Paxton sued to stop it.
A Trump-appointed judge, who previously worked at the Texas attorney general’s office, agreed that it was an unconstitutional overreach and struck down the policy nationwide.
Today, the threshold for mandatory overtime pay remains at $35,568, where the first Trump administration set it in 2019.
Over four years, Paxton’s office ran this same play more than 100 times, filing quick-turn lawsuits asking friendly judges to block President Joe Biden’s signature policies for the whole country. Texas was the tip of the spear, leading almost four times as many lawsuits as the next-highest state and marshaling unprecedented agency resources toward the cause.
This is the key right here. Trump did exactly the same thing five years prior, but when Biden did it, it was suddenly unconstitutional overreach.
Victoria County Judge Drew Tipton burned every last bit of his own credibility just to singe “The Liberal Agenda” a bit.
And then conveniently as soon as Biden was gone and Trump is back, all of a sudden, US Supreme Court steps in and is like “no more striking down federal policy nationwide”!