Rules for Thee, Exemptions for Dan

Dan Patrick loves rules. He loves telling Texans which products they can buy, which businesses can stay open, and which legal industries deserve to exist. He built the 2025 session around it.

The trouble is the same one that follows every politician who governs by decree: the rules are always for somebody else.

The legal products he wanted to outlaw

In 2025, Patrick made banning consumable hemp his top priority. Senate Bill 3 — his Senate's third-numbered bill, a slot reserved for leadership priorities — set out to prohibit the hemp-derived products that licensed Texas retailers had been selling legally since the state itself legalized hemp in 2019.

Think about the position that puts a business owner in. The state told you these products were legal. It issued the licenses. It collected the taxes. You hired people, served customers who checked out exactly like any other lawful purchase, and built something real. Then the Lieutenant Governor decided that the thing the state authorized should be a crime.

"Follow the law" — until it's inconvenient

That is the hypocrisy at the heart of it. Patrick's entire brand is law and order, personal responsibility, playing by the rules. But when the rules he himself helped write created an industry he didn't like, his answer wasn't to respect the law — it was to ban it out of existence and put law-abiding Texans out of work.

It took Governor Greg Abbott's veto on June 22, 2025 to stop him. A Republican governor had to be the adult in the room.

What it says about the man

A leader who respected Texas businesses would have found a way to regulate responsibly — age limits, testing, labeling — the way the state handles every other legal product adults can buy. Patrick didn't want regulation. He wanted a ban, and he wanted the headline.

That's the difference between someone who governs and someone who performs. Texans deserve a Lieutenant Governor who follows the same laws he writes — and who doesn't treat the people who trusted the state's rules as expendable.

There's a choice on the ballot in 2026. We can make it.