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Texas politics update: Articles of impeachment are being floated against attorney general Ken Paxton, the most important culture war figure you don't think of very often. Nearly every 5th circuit ruling that granted a conservative victory had Ken Paxton- or someone in his office- as plaintiff, although he's perhaps better known for his 11th hour attempt to change the outcome of the 2020 election.
The specific matter at hand has to do with a whistleblower settlement over a previous corruption scandal, and it's important to note that almost no one disbelieves the allegations, but also that Ken Paxton won reelection by double digits while under indictment for bribery and fraud. For some additional background-
-The first stage of trial, and the impeachment process, is initiated and takes place in the Texas house, the most liberal branch of the Texas government. It's unclear what Dade Phelan's(house speaker) game is; he's already in extreme trouble both with his base and the rest of the republican party and the odds of actually removing Paxton long term are slim. Nevertheless, it is fairly plausible that the house could impeach him; it only takes 50% +1.
-If impeached, the trial moves to the Senate, where a 2/3 majority would be required to permanently strip him of his office. This is unlikely to happen. The senate is far, far more partisan than the house, Dan Patrick(who had previously loathed Dade Phelan) now openly blames the house speaker for a disappointingly moderate session, and republicans control nearly 2/3 of the chamber. Also, Ken Paxton's wife, Angela, is a fairly high ranking member.
-Paxton is one of the few very important elected Texans left to be drawn from the Dallas elite, with Abbott, Cruz, Hegar, Patrick etc cheering on the Astros rather than the Rangers. The most prominent exception is John Cornyn, who is notably sympathetic to Ken Paxton. This is likely coincidence, but it is worth noting that among the movers and shakers in current political elites Ken Paxton generally runs in different social circles and can't expect much support from current elected officials on his comeback tour, even highly ideologically sympathetic ones.
-The day after it became clear that the house would consider drafting articles of impeachment, the dumpster outside the attorney general's office in Austin caught fire. Texas DPS has investigated the fire and declared it an accident caused by an unknown middle aged woman improperly disposing of a cigarette(Austin PD is no longer independent and not under the control of the city of Austin). Whether you believe this is up to you; certainly the people Texas DPS answers to are not very happy with Dade Phelan and the ones stationed in Austin are selected partially for their ability to handle politically sensitive assignments, because as previously noted part of their job is overruling the Austin city council.
-Just before the news broke Ken Paxton called on Dade Phelan to resign on the grounds of being drunk while presiding over the house. This allegation is probably also true and you can look up videos of Dade with his massive fivehead drunkenly calling the house to order. The Texas legislature being sloshed while in session has been an open secret for a while and no one complained until Dade Phelan seriously annoyed his own party by killing a set of conservative bills on extremely spurious procedural grounds(Paxton was not the first to call for his resignation).
-The Texas house has previously this session removed a representative(Bryan Slaton, R, from Royce city{where Dallas turns rural if you go straight east on i30}) for taking his intern's virginity. They also have an open disciplinary proceeding against rep Jolanda Jones(D, Houston) for a laundry list of rather more entertaining allegations, but this one is unlikely to go anywhere. There have been two previous impeachments of major state offices in Texas history- Governor Pa Ferguson in 1917(he successfully got his wife elected in his place and pulled the strings through her multiple terms) and a judge in the 70's.
https://apnews.com/article/texas-attorney-general-paxton-impeachment-1eaccf00ce80d26c4fc94eab1672e1bd
Update: the Texas house voted to impeach 121-23 today(Saturday) at 1 pm. This points to stronger support for impeachment than I’d originally thought, but is still don’t expect the senate to remove him.
Keep an eye on who Abbott picks for acting attorney general- there could be major culture war implications.
I think Ken Paxton is a tool. As you’ve pointed out, he’s relatively elite, and visibly tries to squirm his way out of anything resembling consequences. He’s had the trial location changed several times now. It’s not like he really goes for the Trump witch hunt defense, either—no, he’s weaponizing boredom. The longer he goes without conviction, the less people will care.
On the other hand, he clearly managed to get re-elected in 2022. I’m not clear on why he’s getting pushback now. God knows the charges aren’t new.
Fundamentally, as a Dallas-area Texan, my opinion means jack shit. I’m just in it for the schadenfreude, because the moment any of these politicians cater to me is the moment their base eats them alive. So that’s nice.
Thank you, though, for the tip on Dade Phelan. That video made my day.
These particular snakes fighting has a pretty big impact on the Biden admin's rulemaking, so I thought it noteworthy for the culturewar roundup. It's not like Phelan is a saint when it comes to bending over for donors.
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I have no idea who any of these people are, but found your post engaging nonetheless.
Come to think of it, it’s interesting how devoid of sportsball teams Austin is, as the capital of its state. Doing a mental inventory, Austin is 0/3 across the NBA, NFL, and MLB. Dallas and Houston are 3/3 (including the hilariously inventive NFL team name of “Texans”) and even San Antonio has the Spurs.
You somehow undersold this. Out of curiosity I looked for a video. Phelan sounded like he was having a stroke—I didn’t realize it was supposed to be English at first. As the video first started playing I thought maybe it was a foreign guest delivering a special interest speech or something before Phelan was up to speak.
Oh, and you calling that a fivehead was also not inaccurate.
Ha, what? That’s pretty wild. It’s probably not going to help Paxton’s popularity with his peers if his accusation of Phelan means an (at least temporary) end to boozy legislature sessions.
What a bunch of haters. They were probably just jealous. Opportunities to pop cherries don’t grow on trees.
The gavel isn't the only thing that's hammered in that video 🤣 The guy is drunk as a lord!
Reminds me of Rowley Birkin Q.C.
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Yeah, my first thought was “was it someone else’s intern?”
Edit: no, apparently just inviting a bunch of 19-year olds and getting them drunk. Eugh.
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Doesn't that tell us what his game is? Paxton is trying to get him turfed out, so this is tit-for-tat "if I go, I'm taking you with me" stuff.
It’s unlikely that Paxton would have called on the speaker to resign without knowing that impeachment proceedings were about to begin- he does have sources other than the regular news for state political news, just like most other important elected officials.
More to the point, Ken Paxton typically runs farther right when challenged over corruption allegations, so embracing the tea party adjacent legislative ethics claims because there’s about to be an investigation is definitely his MO.
It does all sound like internal party feuding, to be fair, but since it's not my country I can sit back and enjoy the fun.
Please keep us informed as developments develop!
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The TDLR is that Austin political leadership went through a phase of attempting to imitate San Francisco, Portland, etc with the whole ‘crime is now legal’ thing, but their police department revolted and got the state government on their side, so now Austin PD is no longer under direct civilian control(of course there’s a more diplomatic phrasing) even as the Austin city council is required to continue funding them, and state police have a heavy presence in the city partly as reinforcements and partly to remind the city council that this arrangement is there to stay, regardless of local political trends.
It does sound a little authoritarian, but then again if the city isn't arresting people committing actual crimes, then something has to be done. I don't think "cut the city government out of the loop" is a good precedent, but if they're useless, I can see why it happened.
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Austin PD answers to Texas DPS, and the more typical political oversight on a local police department has been bypassed. To the extent that it’s anti democratic it’s a scene from Hungary, not Thailand- there’s very definitely a central government calling the shots, it just doesn’t happen to be the one which actually employs and commissions this police department.
Nevertheless you have to go far, far higher up to find a civilian above the APD than you would in other Texas cities. There aren’t tanks on the streets but the city council is cut out of the loop on arrest policies.
I don’t see even then why such a thing would be controversial. If you won’t arrest people committing crimes, it seems really strange to object that other people are.
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Or Canada -- relatively few cities here have their own police department; it's mostly managed either federally or provincially, but with the weird caveat that provinces and cities using the RCMP have to pay out of their own budget; same goes for cities that rely on the OPP (no, not that OPP) AFAIK.
I think the sticking point is more the arbitrary and selective nature of it. If Texas were to just abolish municipal police, hand all LE over to DPS and bill localities based on staffing and facilities levels, it might not be very popular but it wouldn't look like selectively overriding the customary autonomy of an opposition enclave.
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Except that’s the normal way of doing business there and not a state of exception imposed due to either incompetence or state disagreement with their agenda, but yes, it’s definitely a precedented arrangement in the rest of the developed world.
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What's the dynamic here?
In a Banana Republic, voters tolerate this sort of thing because they know that corruption investigations only happen because of political will. So even if your man is corrupt, caring about it would be unilateral disarmement. In the US, this is more or less the situation already with Trump, but I'd imagine Texas politics is too one sided for that to be the issue.
One-party states can easily be corrupt -- after all there's no effective opposition. But what leads to voters shrugging it off like that? Why are they so desperate to elect this particular man?
A lot of the corruption here is bad, but it's not egregiously bad. The main allegations here are that:
Paxton promoted a (since-flopped and fraudy) server company called Servergy Inc., while getting paid by the company, without disclosing that payment or registering with the SEC. His payment was in 100,000 shares of stock, and at least the SEC complaints don't say he ever converted them to cash, so it's kinda hard to estimate a value (outside of it almost certainly being less than 200k USD and probably less than 25k USD).
Provided legal support and political favoritism for a real estate developer named Nate Paul, who had previously donated 25k USD to Paxton's campaign, allegedly provided kitchen renovations, (and possibly hired Paxton's alleged mistress?).
whisteblower retaliations related to the Nate Paul stuff.
This might be illegal, if true. But it's also just not that scandalous, by political standards. He's not selling congressional seats with cash stuffed into a freezer or drunk-driving a woman off a bridge to her death or making up his entire past or Dennis Hastert, for a more literal "
liveboy" scale problems. It's not that much cash, and even adding the stock in at its wildly inflated value it's not exactly eyeball boggling.A lot of people do resign or stop running for reelection under this sort of problem (for Texas, see Jim Wright and Tom Delay), but note that Delay ended up having the conviction overturned on appeal. Or see Ted Stevens, though also see the denouement.
I think a lot of voters consider this as just Things Politicians Do. For all you or I might prefer our politicians as Gentlemen and Gentlewoman Philosophers, who hold a variety of political principles and solely act around those targets, in practice "lie to sell things" and "do favors for constituents" is a lot of their actual day-to-day job. Perhaps Paxton is particularly bad for not crossing the correct is and dotting the correct ts, for not playing the game Properly, or for being dumb or unlucky enough to help out sufficiently bad scumbags (eg, Servergy was hilariously fraudy, as in selling 32-bit 'servers' in 2012 and offering thermodynamically implausible energy-savings, Paul looks a little more bog-standard real estate fake but is at a larger scale and far less professional scale). But especially given some of the other problems enforcement actions around this class of corruption has had, and the suspicion that a lot of technically-legal-but-just-as-odious stuff exists, I don't think it's axiomatic that voters have to care.
Thanks for that. It sounds like Banana Replublic logic does in fact apply.
The scandals you list sound awfully Clintonesque, so I can see why a voter would not want to unilaterally disarm because of them. That said, as far as I can tell, the Clintons are unusually corrupt by the standards of prominent American politicians. I mean how is it that the many enemies of DONALD TRUMP can't come up with a good real-estate scandal to use against him, and have to settle for pissant stuff about paying off pornstars?
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Sounds like par for the course. There was a similar, albeit much smaller scale, scandal in my own home town a few years back.
Local councillor accused of getting favourable treatment for local developer to get planning permission when he shouldn't have, with allegations of cash changing hands. It came to light because the guy was dumb enough to dump his wife for a new, younger, squeeze and Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, so she immediately started blowing whistles left, right and centre about hubby's alleged dodgy dealings.
It was an entire, steaming mess: he was put on trial for corruption charges and convicted and went to jail for a couple of years. The ironic thing was the developer was also tried on similar charges but found not guilty. I never quite understood how one guy could be convicted for a crime that a different trial said didn't happen, and presumably so did he, because he appealed for a retrial but didn't get it.
After he got out of jail, it had wrecked not only his life, but his parents' life, because their business went under due to the needs of paying for his defence, etc. Paxton sounds to be getting off lightly by comparison, is the wife not salty about the alleged mistress or is this a case of "let's all keep face and pretend we're a happy family"?
The server firm also sounds "dodgy but the usual kind of thing", and if he never cashed in the shares and the company later went bust, he can probably claim this was all legit investing on his part in a business he believed would do well. Taking payments and not declaring them is also usual politician behaviour, it'll be interesting to see if he can get away with that.
It's worth noting that the wife is, by all accounts, an active participant in at least the cover up efforts if not her husband's actual (small scale)corruption.
So he's smart enough to make it a family affair instead of dumping his missus for the young hottie.
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NJ re-elects Bob Menendez to the Senate every six years, and he's constantly under investigation/indictment/trial for some scheme or another.
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Ken Paxton is both personally popular because of his record at winning fights with the federal government(for Texas politicians this makes it very easy to cast yourself as the sort of champion of the people who of course has some skeletons in his closet, what do you expect?), and has been blessed with terrible opponents. In the primary he managed to come out ahead in a divided field and then win the runoff partly because his runoff opponent was literally named George bush(related, not the same). In the general, he faced off against a left wing activist who’d done pro bono work for cartel linked human traffickers- it probably would have at least been a closer contest if democrats had run a normal moderate.
But also he claims credit for bullying the Biden admin into reinstating title 42, increasing domestic oil production, and canceling the private sector vax mandate.
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Texas is not really a one party state.
The media demand for corrupt Republican one party states exceeds the supply.
I'm sure corruption exists, but it's funny to talk about these mild cases when Baltimore and Detroit exist.
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