It may seem like a small, insignificant case, but it’s a case that will ripple across the country:  A three-judge panel consisting of GHW Bush, Trump and Biden appointees unanimously upheld a lower court’s decision barring Texas from enforcing a law passed in 2023 demanding textbook publishers put a “sexual content” rating in their books.  The panel agreed with the lower court judge who determined the law violated the First Amendment rights of publishers, students and others.

The decision is significant for a number of reasons.  First, the decision comes from the very conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and has two conservative judges supporting it.  If Abbott tries to appeal it higher, he’s battling the judicial decisions of at least one Federalist Society-approved judge who wrote the decision.

But more importantly, it thwarts the goal of the puritanical Texas officials who wanted the rating system of the Texas Board of Education to become the moralistic textbook equivalent of the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture seal for food: for decades, Pennsylvania’s stringent food quality guidelines made it the gold standard for states, saving those states and companies the cost of individually certifying the quality of the products.  (Basically:  “If it’s good enough for Pennsylvania, it’s good enough for us.”)

Because the State of Texas is the largest single purchaser of textbooks in the country, meaning textbook publishers frequently acquiesce to the state Board of Education’s demands on style and content, Texas thought it could flex that power to become the state that other stick-up-their-asses states aspired to be, with their rating scale on every textbook in the country.