“Texas AGs have often been scoundrels”
Seems the blush is off the Texas rose (Texas Tribune):
For Angela Paxton, June 1 will always be “I love you day,” the anniversary of the first time a baby-faced Baylor undergrad named Ken told her he loved her.
This year, “I love you day” will have a dark cloud looming over it, as that young man, now the attorney general of Texas, faces removal from office by the state Senate — of which Angela Paxton is a member.
On Saturday, the Texas House voted 121-23 to impeach Ken Paxton on a range of charges, at least one of which involved his wife, and at least one of which related to an alleged extramarital affair. Ken Paxton is suspended while the Senate decides whether he should be removed from office.
Paxton’s reputation as a scoundrel did not stop him in Texas from becoming attorney general. He has been under indictment for felony securities fraud for nearly eight years. His lawyers have managed to redirect the case to friendly turf his home county and delay, delay, delay. If it wasn’t beneath him, presidential candidate Donald Trump might tap Paxton for pointers.
On Saturday, the Republican-led Texas House impeached Paxton “over a series of bribery and corruption allegations, including that he had given special treatment to a campaign donor who helped him remodel his house,” reports The New York Times.
“I am early in my ‘Ken Paxton, WTF’ lessons,” tweeted Jay Rosen, pointing to a backgrounder by Christopher Hooks in Texas Monthly from several days ago:
At the start of this week, the Texas Legislature was sliding toward the conclusion of yet another underwhelming, but basically normal, session. Lawmakers had wasted a lot of time and effort, and soon they would go home. But the calm was illusory. By the end of the week, everything was in flames: blood was sloshing down the Capitol’s marble halls like the building was the Overlook Hotel. Attorney General Ken Paxton called House Speaker Dade Phelan a drunk, urging him to resign and “get the help he needs”; later that afternoon, a House committee announced it had been investigating Paxton for months. The Texas House met Saturday, and after about four hours of debate, voted to impeach Paxton. To paraphrase Mao: everything under the dome is in chaos; the situation is excellent. There’s been a lot of news coverage of the events of the last week. But this being Texas, it’s all underlaid by decades of lore, animosities, and seemingly unaccountable behavior. So if you’re trying to get in on the fun, here’s a primer.
“Texas AGs have often been scoundrels,” the primer begins, letting the uninititated know Paxton follows in a long tradition. Except the term is too restrained to describe the expanse of Paxton’s behaviors.
What follows is another 2,600 words from Hooks outlining Paxton’s running interference for “Nate Paul, an allegedly corrupt Austin real estate kingpin—or former kingpin,” the aforementioned campaign donor and renovator, when the FBI came for Paul. Then Paxton covered up his interference with the investigation. Seven staffers wrote the U.S. Department of Justice accusing Paxton of bribery and corruption. Paxton fired the whistleblowers, Hooks writes, and the Legislature looked the other way.
What’s changed? Hooks offers a few possibilities:
The material facts of the case changed in the past few months. The whistleblowers had a slam-dunk case for illegal termination. Some of them sued. Partly in order to shut down the lawsuit quickly—and to prevent the plaintiffs from liberating AG documents via the discovery process—Paxton settled in February 2023, offering them $3.3 million in taxpayer money. He asked lawmakers to fund the settlement. Even though the dollar amount was trivial, this didn’t sit well with many in the Legislature. Paxton was asking them to eat a turd sandwich so he could protect himself from his own stupidity. It made them look bad. It made the party look bad.
In March, the House Committee on General Investigating opened an investigation into the settlement. The committee is most famous this session for laying the groundwork for the unanimous expulsion of Bryan Slaton, the Republican former representative from Royse City who had sex with a nineteen-year-old staffer after giving her alcohol. The Slaton case was known within the committee as “Matter B.” The Paxton inquiry was known as “Matter A.” The committee has been working on it for months, hiring five investigators. Though their work was clearly diligent and thorough, it couldn’t have been all that difficult: most of the material behind the twenty impeachment charges the committee gave to the House is publicly available. Some of it has been known for the better part of a decade.
And look, these guys all knew what Paxton was. There’s a famous story about Paxton and Governor Greg Abbott that has circulated in Lege circles for years but has never been addressed by either man. When Paxton was a lowly lawmaker and Abbott was the attorney general, the story goes, they ended up in a box together at a football game. Supposedly, Abbott unleashed on Paxton about his unethical and potentially illegal behavior, making his contempt clear. Within just a few years, Paxton was attorney general and Abbott was celebrating him on the campaign trail. Lawmakers and state leaders hadn’t learned to love Paxton, presumably. But taking him on would have eaten up political capital and alienated Paxton’s powerful right-wing backers. So they just . . . didn’t.
The reality is, there was no clear way for the Lege to get rid of Paxton other than by beating him in an election or impeaching him. The first has proven very difficult. Impeachment, which is so alien a process to the modern Legislature that it might as well have come from Mars, needed a hook. Nothing Paxton did before he became attorney general would work—that includes his Servergy escapades. It’s arguably not until this session that the Lege has had a clear case: Paxton asked for taxpayer money to pay off whistleblowers he had illegally fired to cover up other illegal activity. On Friday, the House committee conducting the investigation released a statement in which it underlined the connection. “We cannot over-emphasize the fact that, but for Paxton’s own request for a taxpayer-funded settlement . . . Paxton would not be facing impeachment.”
The Republican-led investigating committee on Thursday returned 20 articles of impeachment against Paxton, the Times reports, “charging him with a litany of abuses including taking bribes, disregarding his official duty, obstructing justice in a separate securities fraud case pending against him, making false statements on official documents and reports, and abusing the public trust.”
Welcome to Texas, where even the impeachments are bigger.
The first thing I ever read by Texas’ own Molly Ivins was titled (IIRC), “Inside the Austin Funhouse,” meaning the state capitol where legislators regularly went to “fist city.” On Saturday they suspended Paxton and went to impeachment for the first time in over a century.