(Just The News)—A judge has expanded a temporary restraining order against former U.S. Rep. Robert (Beto) O’Rourke and his organization, Powered by People, as well as ActBlue and any bank or financial institution with whom they do business.
The order was issued on Saturday after Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a motion with the court on Friday requesting it to expand an initial order issued last week.
Eight days ago, a Texas district court granted a request for a temporary restraining order against O’Rourke and Powered by People, after both claimed to raise money to fund dozens of House Democrats leaving Texas, The Center Square reported. More than 50 left in protest to prevent the Texas House from conducting official business, including voting for a Congressional redistricting bill they oppose.
Paxton’s office also launched an investigation into Powered by the People and Texas Majority PAC, The Center Square reported.
The court’s initial order blocked O’Rourke and Powered by People from continuing to raise or distribute money for absconding Democrats. After the ruling, O’Rourke said the order wasn’t stopping him from raising money. The next day, he held a rally in Fort Worth, saying, “Still here, still raising and rallying to stop the steal of 5 congressional seats in Texas,” referencing the the new proposed maps that could flip up to five Democrat-held seats to Republican in the 2026 midterms.
O’Rourke also posted videos on social media of him speaking at rallies to raise money for the House Democratic cause in Kansas City and in Fort Worth. He also posted links to raise money, saying, “the gloves are off. Donate now.”
Powered by People and the Democratic PAC ActBlue continued to raise money to “fight” Texas redistricting efforts, prompting Paxton to file a motion of contempt against O’Rourke, The Center Square reported.
Late Friday, Paxton filed an amended petition requesting the court to revoke Powered by People’s charter, arguing it is “responsible for deceptively fundraising and handing out ‘Beto Bribes’ to Democrat legislators in exchange for breaking quorum.”
Paxton argues O’Rourke and the organization “have deceived donors, bought off Texas politicians, and unlawfully assisted runaway Democrats in avoiding arrest.” He asked the court to “enforce its previous TRO, throw Beto behind bars, and revoke Powered by People’s charter for its unlawful conduct. There must be consequences.”
The amended complaint claims “O’Rourke and Powered by People are directing consumers to political fundraising platforms, such as ActBlue, for the express political purpose of ‘fight[ing]’ Republicans and protecting Democratic seats from ‘corrupt republicans,’ meanwhile the funds are actually being used for lavish personal expenditures (i.e. travel on private jets, luxury hotel accommodations, and fine dining that is disconnected from, and has no legitimate purpose relating to, their legislative positions).”
It also claims the defendants engaged in unlawful and deceptive fundraising practices in Tarrant County and engaged in deceptive trade practices in the solicitation and receipt of donations. It also asks the court to approve a Notice of Lien “to immediately halt Defendants’ unlawful conduct.”
On Saturday, Judge Megan Fahey issued an expanded TRO through Sept. 5 and scheduled a hearing for a temporary injunction on Sept. 2.
“The Court finds that harm is imminent to the State, and if the Court does not issue this order, the State will be irreparably injured,” Fahey said in her ruling. “Specifically, Defendants’ fundraising conduct constitutes false, misleading, or deceptive acts under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act” and Texas business codes. “Because Defendants are raising and utilizing political contributions from Texas consumers to pay for the personal expenses of Texas legislators, in violation of Texas law. Because this conduct is unlawful and harms Texas consumers, restraining this conduct is in the public interest.”
After the ruling, Paxton said, “His fraudulent attempt to pad the pockets of the rogue cowards abandoning Texas has been stopped, and now the court has rightly frozen his ability to continue to send money outside of Texas. The cabal of Democrats who have colluded together to scam Texans and derail our Legislature will face the full force of the law, starting with Robert Francis O’Rourke.”
On Saturday, O’Rourke was involved in another rally in Austin and thanked “everyone who has joined us in this fight for Texas.” As a result of their fundraising efforts, they donated more than $1 million to the Texas Legislative Black Caucus, the Texas House Democratic Caucus, and the Mexican American Legislative Caucus during the special session, he announced.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
If the Dems steal votes by gerrymandering, is it stealing to reverse the steal?
Butthole O’Rourke
In ATX, Beta fights for the right to put his constituents in tents, allow them ample sidewalk space to squat on and encouragement to 💩 on them. Any opposition to that is Trump loving rasis, lgbtq phobic and capitalistic.