A Leftist Judge Blocks ActBlue Lawsuit to Protect Democrat Candidates

A federal judge handed ActBlue a get-out-of-jail-free card on Thursday, blocking Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton from pursuing a lawsuit against the Democrat fundraising platform. District Judge Richard Stearns decided the lawsuit was political. Specifically, Stearns concluded Paxton filed it to retaliate against ActBlue for raising money for his U.S. Senate opponent, James Talarico.

Stearns wrote in his decision, "The lawsuit in Texas is undoubtedly an adverse action. And having previously found bad faith, the court agrees with ActBlue that the evidence in the record compels the conclusion that, far from protecting Texas consumers, the action was filed in retaliation for ActBlue's fundraising on behalf of Talarico, Paxton's current political rival for the Senate seat."

There's just one problem with that claim.

Paxton's investigation into ActBlue started in Dec. 2023. Talarico didn't enter the Senate race until Sept. 2025. That's nearly two years before the "political rival" Stearns claims Paxton was targeting even announced a candidacy. And the judge knows this, because his own ruling says so.

The factual background section of that same ruling tells a different story. Stearns wrote:

ActBlue is a prominent fundraising platform for Democratic candidates for public office, amassing as much as $19 billion in donations, mostly from small contributors, since its founding in 2004. In December of 2023, Paxton began investigating ActBlue with the stated purpose of determining “whether ActBlue's operations are compliant with all applicable laws.” The next month, he served ActBlue with a Request to Examine (RTE) to be conducted at ActBlue's headquarters in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Think about that for a second. Stearns literally acknowledged in his own ruling that the investigation began in late 2023, well before Talarico was a candidate. But he still “concluded” it was retaliatory? What a joke.

Here’s the real problem. The lawsuit itself has real substance. Paxton alleges ActBlue violated Texas law by misleading consumers about its fundraising practices. The platform told Congress in 2024 that it had stopped accepting donations via gift cards and foreign prepaid debit cards, only to quietly resume accepting gift card donations afterward. That's a serious allegation, with nothing to do with Talarico. None. Nada. Zilch. It's about whether ActBlue lied to Congress and, in the process, broke state consumer protection laws.

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Paxton had already been pushing on this at the federal level. In 2024 (again, before Talarico was even a candidate), he filed a Petition for Rulemaking with the Federal Election Commission, to close the fundraising loopholes ActBlue exploits. This was a sustained, multi-front legal effort that predated Talarico's Senate announcement by nearly two years. Reuters left all of that context out of its report on the injunction.

Convenient.

Paxton will obviously appeal the ruling. "Texas has every right to enforce its own laws to protect our citizens, and we will continue to fight to hold ActBlue accountable," he said on X.

Good. Because what Stearns did here goes well beyond bad legal reasoning. ActBlue has funneled billions into Democrat campaigns, and now gets judicial protection the moment a state attorney general tries to examine whether its practices are even legal. The platform told Congress one thing, did another, and a federal judge decided the Republican who noticed was the real problem.

Stearns isn't applying the law. He's running interference for a fundraising machine the entire Democrat Party depends on to stay competitive. If ActBlue's practices hold up under scrutiny, it has nothing to fear from Paxton's lawsuit. A judge swooping in to kill that scrutiny tells you exactly what this ruling is actually about: helping Democrats.

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