Background and career
Gregory Wayne Abbott ( ABB-ət; born November 13, 1957) is an American politician, attorney, and jurist serving since 2015 as the 48th governor of Texas. A member of the Republican Party, he served from 2002 to 2015 as the 50th attorney general of Texas and from 1996 to 2001 as a justice of the Texas Supreme Court. As of 2025, Abbott is the longest-serving incumbent governor in the United States. Born in Wichita Falls, Texas, Abbott grew up between Longview and Duncanville. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a Bachelor of Business Administration in 1981 and from Vanderbilt University with a Juris Doctor in 1984. After going into private practice, working for Butler and Binion, LLP between 1984 and 1992, he began his judicial career in Houston, where he served as a state trial judge in the 129th District Court for three years. Before becoming attorney general, Abbott was a justice of the Texas Supreme Court, a position to which he was appointed in 1995 by Governor George W. Bush. Abbott won a full term in 1998 with 60% of the vote. After resigning from the Supreme Court to run for Texas lieutenant governor, Abbott returned to private practice and worked for Bracewell & Giuliani in 2001. Abbott was elected Texas attorney general with 57% of the vote in 2002 and reelected with 60% in 2006 and 64% in 2010. He became the longest-serving attorney general in state history, with 12 years of service, and was the third Republican to hold that office since the Reconstruction era. As attorney general, Abbott successfully advocated for the Texas State Capitol to display the Ten Commandments in the 2005 U.S. Supreme Court case Van Orden v. Perry, and unsuccessfully defended the state's ban on same-sex marriage. He was also involved in numerous lawsuits against the administration of Barack Obama, seeking to invalidate the Affordable Care Act and the administration's environmental regulations. Elected in 2014, Abbott is the first Texas governor and third governor of a U.S. state to use a wheelchair, the others being Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York and George Wallace of Alabama. He was reelected in 2018 and in 2022, and is running for an unprecedented fourth term in 2026. As governor, Abbott supported the first administration of Donald Trump and has promoted a strongly conservative agenda, including maintaining Texas's total abortion ban, loosening gun laws, increasing law enforcement funding, and tightening voting rights. In response to the power crisis following a February 2021 winter storm, Abbott called for reforms to Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) and signed a bill requiring power plant weatherization. During the COVID-19 pandemic in Texas, Abbott opposed implementing face mask and vaccine mandates, while blocking local governments, businesses, and other organizations from implementing their own. He has also made a priority of fighting illegal immigration, starting Operation Lone Star in 2021. Abbott was on Time magazine's Time 100 list in 2024.
Abbott was born on November 13, 1957, in Wichita Falls, Texas, and is of English descent. His mother, Doris Lechristia Jacks Abbott, was a housewife and his father, Calvin Rodger Abbott, was a stockbroker and insurance agent. When he was six years old, they moved to Longview; the family lived there for six years. When he was 12, Abbott's family moved to Duncanville. In his sophomore year in high school, his father died of a heart attack; his mother went to work in a real estate office. Abbott graduated from Duncanville High School, where he was on the track team, in the National Honor Society and was voted "Most Likely to Succeed". In 1981, Abbott earned a Bachelor of Business Administration in finance from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity and the Young Republicans Club. He met his wife, Cecilia Phalen, while attending UT Austin. The two married in 1981. In 1984, he earned his Juris Doctor degree from the Vanderbilt University Law School. Abbott went into private practice, working for Butler and Binion, LLP between 1984 and 1992.
Abbott's judicial career began in Houston, where he served as a state trial judge in the 129th District Court for three years. Governor George W. Bush appointed Abbott to the state's highest civil court, Texas Supreme Court, to which he was twice elected, in 1996 (for a two-year term) and in 1998 (six-year term). In 1996, Abbott had no Democratic opponent but was challenged by Libertarian John B. Hawley of Dallas. Abbott defeated Hawley, 84% to 16%. In 1998, Abbott defeated Democrat David Van Os, 60% to 40%. In 2001, after resigning from the Supreme Court, Abbott returned to private practice and worked for Bracewell & Giuliani LLC. He was also an adjunct professor at University of Texas School of Law.
Abbott resigned from the Texas Supreme Court on June 6, 2001, to run for lieutenant governor of Texas. He had been campaigning for several months when the previous attorney general, John Cornyn, vacated the post to run for the U.S. Senate. Abbott then switched his campaign to the open attorney general's position in 2002. He defeated the Democratic nominee, former Austin mayor and former state senator Kirk Watson, 57% to 41%. Abbott was sworn in on December 2, 2002, following Cornyn's election to the Senate.
Abbott expanded the attorney general's office's law enforcement division from about 30 people to more than 100. He also created a new division, the Fugitive Unit, to track down convicted sex offenders in violation of their paroles or probations. In 2003, Abbott supported the Texas Legislature's move to cap non-economic damages for medical malpractice cases at $250,000, with no built-in increases for rising cost of living. In a 2013 speech to fellow Republicans, when asked what his job entails, Abbott said: "I go into the office in the morning, I sue Barack Obama, and then I go home." Abbott filed 31 lawsuits against the Obama administration, including suits against the Environmental Protection Agency; the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, including challenges to the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare"); and the U.S. Department of Education, among many others. According to The Wall Street Journal, from Abbott's tenure as attorney general through his first term as governor, Texas sued the Obama administration at least 44 times, more than any other state over the same period; court challenges included carbon-emission standards, health-care reform, transgender rights, and others. The Dallas Morning News compared Abbott to Scott Pruitt, noting that both attorneys general had repeatedly sued the federal government over its environmental regulations. The Houston Chronicle noted that Abbott "led the charge against Obama-era climate regulations". Abbott has said that the state must not release Tier II Chemical Inventory Reports for security reasons, but that Texans "can ask every facility whether they have chemicals or not". Koch Industries has denied that its contributions to Abbott's campaign had anything to do with his ruling against releasing the safety information. In March 2014, Abbott filed a motion to intervene on behalf of Baylor Scott & White Medical Center – Plano in three federal lawsuits against the hospital, brought by patients who alleged that the hospital allowed Christopher Duntsch to perform neurosurgery despite knowing that he was a dangerous physician. Abbott cited the Texas legislature's cap on malpractice cases and the statute's removal of the term "gross negligence" from the definition of legal malice as reasons for defending Baylor. In the late 2000s, Abbott established a unit in the attorney general's office to pursue voter-fraud prosecutions, using a $1.4 million federal grant; the unit prosecuted a few dozen cases, resulting in small fines and little to no jail time. The office found no large-scale fraud that could change the outcome of any election.
In December 2005, Abbott sued Sony BMG. Texas was the first state in the nation to bring legal action against Sony BMG for illegal spyware. The suit was also the first filed under the state's spyware law of 2005. It alleged the company surreptitiously installed the spyware on millions of compact music discs (CDs) that consumers inserted into their computers when they played the CDs, which can compromise the systems. On December 21, 2005, Abbott added new allegations to his lawsuit against Sony-BMG. He said the MediaMax copy protection technology violated Texas's spyware and deceptive trade practices laws. Sony-BMG offered consumers a licensing agreement when they bought CDs and played them on their computers; in the lawsuit, brought under the Consumer Protection Against Computer Spyware Act of 2005 and other laws, Abbott alleged that even if consumers rejected that agreement, spyware was secretly installed on their computers, posing security risks for music buyers and deceiving Texas purchasers. Sony settled the Texas lawsuit, as well as a similar suit brought by California's attorney general, for $1.5 million.
