Senate State Affairs to Examine Gaming Platforms, Family Courts and the Lottery Handover

The Texas Senate Committee on State Affairs will gavel in at 9 a.m. Sept. 14 in Capitol Extension room E1.012 to take public and invited testimony on three interim charges: whether online gaming platforms do enough to keep adult strangers and explicit content away from children, whether Texas family courts drag divorce and custody cases out longer than they should, and how the state lottery is faring a year after lawmakers abolished the agency that ran it. Public testimony will be limited to two minutes per witness, and anyone filing written testimony must bring 20 copies for the committee clerk, according to the hearing notice. The Senate does not accept online comments on this agenda.

Sen. Bryan Hughes, R–Mineola, chairs the nine-member panel — eight Republicans and one Democrat, Sen. Judith Zaffirini of Laredo — with Sen. Angela Paxton, R–McKinney, as vice chair, according to the committee’s page. State Affairs carries 11 interim charges this cycle, ranging from election security to banking access to prediction-market gambling; three of them are on this notice. The panel last met June 23.

The Protecting Minors Online charge directs members to identify which gaming platforms advertise to minors, judge whether those ads are appropriate, and assess whether the platforms’ age verification and youth protections hold up. It also asks for recommendations to bar communications between minors and adult strangers in games — a direct echo of Attorney General Ken Paxton’s November 2025 lawsuit against Roblox, which accuses the platform of deceiving parents about the risks children face there. The hearing also lands while the state’s broadest online age-verification law is still being litigated: Senate Bill 2420, the App Store Accountability Act, was enjoined in December 2025, revived by a Fifth Circuit stay, and left in force when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to block it in July. The House is working the same ground from a different angle after Speaker Dustin Burrows issued his own gaming-platform safety charge in April.

The Protecting Texas Families charge moves to the family courts. Members are asked to identify what makes divorce and child custody proceedings unpredictable — delays, repeated evaluations of the same child, inconsistent timelines from one court to the next — and to recommend procedures that treat similarly situated families the same way. It is the newest of the committee’s charges to reach a hearing, and the notice offers no bill numbers to anchor it, which makes the invited witness list worth watching for whether the panel leans on judges, the family bar or parents.

The monitoring charge is narrower than the committee’s written version, which covers two statutes. The notice lists only Senate Bill 3070, the law that abolished the Texas Lottery Commission and moved the lottery and charitable bingo to the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation; the committee’s other monitoring item, Senate Bill 2337 on proxy advisory services, is not on this agenda. TDLR took the lottery over in September 2025 after investigations into the commission by the Texas Rangers and the attorney general’s office. The Dispatch reported this month that lottery sales barely moved in the first year under the new agency.

Because this is an interim hearing, the committee will take no votes and no legislation is before it. What members hear will shape the panel’s interim report and the bills filed for the 90th Legislature, which convenes in January 2027.

Meeting at a glance

Committee members

• Sen. Bryan Hughes, R–Mineola (SD-1) — Chair
• Sen. Angela Paxton, R–McKinney (SD-8) — Vice Chair
• Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R–Houston (SD-7)
• Sen. Bob Hall, R–Edgewood (SD-2)
• Sen. Adam Hinojosa, R–Corpus Christi (SD-27)
• Sen. Tan Parker, R–Flower Mound (SD-12)
• Sen. Charles Perry, R–Lubbock (SD-28)
• Sen. Charles Schwertner, R–Georgetown (SD-5)
• Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D–Laredo (SD-21)