In 2023, Texas overcame lawsuits that sought to prevent constitutional amendments from going into effect, but one that voters approved in 2021 is still blocked.
If an Austin court hearing this past week is an early indication of how a lawsuit blocking Texas’ $3 billion dementia research fund will fare, state leaders who championed it and the voters who overwhelmingly approved it by more than a 2-1 margin may have little worry.
Last Tuesday, it took 21 minutes of back-and-forth between state District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble and one of plaintiffs — a self-proclaimed Texas voter representing herself without an attorney — for the judge to politely but firmly point out she had missed a critical step to move forward with any lawsuit: properly notify the people she is suing.
“You’re not going to have a temporary injunction hearing today,” the judge told Shannon Huggins that she and fellow plaintiffs Lars Kuslich and Jose Silvester had missed properly serving Gov. Greg Abbott and Texas Comptroller Kelly Hancock with their Nov. 13 lawsuit.
The trio’s case is still in play — and the Dementia Prevention and Research Institute, one of 17 constitutional amendments voters passed on Nov. 4, is still blocked from going into effect — but this first shaky court appearance offered a look at what Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick considered a pressing problem: “frivolous” challenges to constitutional amendments.
Challenges to constitutional amendments have become such a growing concern and problem that this year the Texas Legislature passed a comprehensive judicial bill that included a provision to prevent lawsuits from halting constitutional amendments like DPRIT’s Proposition 14, which 2 million Texas voters approved.
However, that law, House Bill 16, didn’t go into effect until Thursday, much too late to have blocked last month’s lawsuit from halting DPRIT.
The crux of the plaintiff’s DPRIT lawsuit is this: they say the voting machines used in 251 of the state’s 254 counties used to tabulate the results in the Nov. 4 election were not properly tested for accuracy, invalidating any ballots tabulated on them, and, they want a new election. The concerns are unfounded and the machines were properly certified. That’s untrue, according to the Secretary of State’s website, which tests and approves the machines used.
Legal experts and lawmakers say faulty voting machines isn’t the chief concern of the plaintiffs, who are typically conservative citizens who oppose any attempts at increasing government spending. Their main goal is to block an expensive piece of legislation, such as DPRIT and not the 16 other relatively low-cost constitutional amendments that passed this year, from going into effect. DPRIT would initially provide $3 billion in funding to researchers and up to $300 million annually after that.
This strategy was used in 2023 to block all constitutional amendments, which included billions of dollars of state spending. Soon after those lawsuits were filed, those constitutional amendments went into effect because the state’s attorneys were able to show that the plaintiffs did not properly serve the Secretary of State with their lawsuits. Because they had not served the Secretary of State properly, Abbott was able to certify the results, allowing the ballot measures to go into effect.
In the most recent lawsuit challenging DPRIT, it’s not clear whether the plaintiffs’ flub as shown during Tuesday’s hearing will result in the same outcome as the 2023 cases. Abbott’s office offered no comment on the matter, saying only that the governor had advised Texans to vote for all the constitutional amendments. The Texas Attorney General’s office has not returned requests for comment on the DPRIT lawsuit or the next legal steps to be taken.
Source: Terri Langford, The Texas Tribune
Photo Credit: Jose Silvester, left, and Shannon Huggins exit the Travis County Civil and Family Courts Facility on Dec. 2, 2025. They are suing state officials over Proposition 14, which establishes the Dementia Prevention Research Institute. Kaylee Greenlee for The Texas Tribune
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