Eric Gay/AP Photo
Ellen McCluskey holds a sign outside the Senate Chamber as the impeachment trial for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton continues at the Texas Capitol, September 14, 2023, in Austin.
Texas has been a reliably Republican state for over two decades now, producing national figures like George W. Bush, Ted Cruz, and Rick Perry. Recently, the Texas GOP has gotten national attention for a less savory figure: Attorney General Ken Paxton, who was impeached by the Texas House earlier this year for egregious abuse of his powers of office.
That was remarkable given that the House is controlled by Republicans. Yet as Justin Miller reports at the Texas Observer, in the trial in the Texas Senate, Paxton was acquitted on every count. That’s the Republican Party for you—even when some party members attempt to rid themselves of their worst elements, they are slapped down by the rest.
As Christopher Hooks explains at Texas Monthly, Paxton has long been a cat’s-paw for Tim Dunn, a fervently right-wing oil billionaire who has been funding the state’s Republicans for years. When the GOP finally took control of the House and the rest of the state government in 2002 for the first time since the 1870s, Dunn and his fellow oligarchs assumed that they’d have the run of the state. But because the Texas House elects its Speaker with a simple majority vote of both parties, the remaining Democrats allied with traditional business-minded Republicans to elect the relative moderate Joe Straus as Speaker of the House. This infuriated Dunn not only because Straus is not a febrile reactionary, but because he was the first Jewish Speaker in Texas history. Dunn reportedly told Straus to his face that only Christians should be in offices of state leadership.
But that wasn’t Dunn’s only priority. Another was taking care of the Texas Ethics Commission, which had drawn Dunn’s ire by attempting to impose minimal disclosure requirements on his enormous political spending. He backed Paxton heavily in the attorney general race of 2014, which was decisive. Sure enough, Paxton then cut off legal support for the TEC in its legal battles against Dunn, which put a stop to the disclosure requests.
In office, Paxton’s door was unsurprisingly open to about any conservative with a big bank account, a checkbook, and a functioning pen, which brings us to the impeachment. One was real estate developer Nate Paul, who not only cut campaign checks but also employed Paxton’s mistress, and was facing scrutiny from federal law enforcement. Paxton directed his staff to help Paul fight off the feds. “When they resisted, Paxton threatened to fire them; after they blew the whistle, Paxton did fire them,” Hooks writes.
So a critical mass of House Republicans decided they had had enough of this guy, not least because his record of achieving anything in office is poor. Paxton’s scandals drag the party down—he was also charged with securities fraud in 2015, though he’s managed to drag out the start of the trial for eight years and counting—and he isn’t even very good at filing tendentious lawsuits to give the Fifth Circuit and Supreme Court an excuse to legislate by decree. And then in June, after the impeachment vote, Paul was arrested and charged in federal court with eight counts of making false statements and reports to financial companies.
Ken Paxton might be a corrupt, incompetent doofus. But he is very good at doing what his oligarch paymasters tell him to do, and then activating the conservative grievance industrial complex by claiming to be the victim of a conspiracy when facing accountability of any sort. “This shameful process was curated from the start as an act of political retribution,” he said in a news conference just before being impeached. “Let’s restore the power of this great state to the people, instead of the politicians,” he added, with truly astounding chutzpah.
It worked.
Today’s Republican Party simply selects for this kind of person now. This is what their system produces: toadies and lickspittles for oligarch billionaires, whose bone-deep corruption actually makes them more appealing to the billionaire class. As Hooks points out, Paxton is totally dependent on Dunn’s support, without which he would have fallen years ago.
There are many other examples of this kind of Republican, but none more relevant than Donald Trump, who combines the role of corrupt toady and oligarch billionaire into one person. This was a guy who campaigned on the same kind of hysterical nonsense as previous Republicans, except even more shamelessly, and in office was by far the most corrupt president in American history. When he lost, he claimed to be the victim of a conspiracy, attempted to overthrow the government to stay in office, and in the process nearly got many Republican members of Congress lynched if his mob had caught up with them. But when it came to convicting him for attempting to negate the outcome of the presidential election, the party blinked and acquitted him in the Senate.
Now, both Texas and nationwide, Republicans are saddled with comically corrupt and unpopular leaders who are facing criminal indictments. Trump is facing 91 felony counts in four different jurisdictions, and may face more. Paxton, it seems, will no longer be able to delay his securities fraud trial much longer, and may face more charges relating to the Paul affair.
The political choice for the foreseeable future is clear: If voters want politicians who flagrantly abuse their powers of office to benefit themselves and their oligarch enablers, the Republican Party is the way to go. They just can’t help themselves.
