Texas House votes to impeach AG Ken Paxton

The Texas House on Saturday voted to impeach embattled state Attorney General Ken Paxton (R).

The vote was 121-23, with two present but not voting, and three who were absent from the chamber. He will be suspended from office pending a trial in the Senate.

The impeachment represents a sudden reversal for Paxton, who has twice cruised to reelection despite being under active federal indictment.

On Thursday, a state House investigative committee recommended his impeachment, finding that he had “used, misused, or failed to use his official powers in a manner calculated to subvert the lawful operation of the government.”

The 20 counts in the resolution contained a grab bag of alleged inappropriate favors done for donors, interference in federal investigations and retaliation against whistleblowers.

But at their centerpiece were sordid accusations of infidelity, bribery and abuse of official power — followed by an alleged campaign of retaliation against Paxton’s deputies who say they attempted to bring it to light.

Some elements of the account put forward by the committee were familiar from ongoing wrongful termination lawsuits by those deputies. They had charged that Paxton illegitimately intervened in litigation by one of his donors, Austin realtor Nate Paul — and that Paul had paid him back by remodeling his house and finding a make-work job for Paxton’s affair partner, a former staffer in his wife’s office.

But other charges revealed to the state House on Wednesday were new. Paxton, the investigative team told the committee, had interfered with an FBI investigation. He had turned out subpoenas to threaten enemies of his donors, they alleged. 

And in one dramatic move, they told the committee that Paxton issued a bespoke legal opinion blocking all foreclosure sales in Texas, citing COVID. 

This, they noted, was an opinion his office published after just days instead of the usual weeks and had never officially posted, and that came out just in time to halt the foreclosure auction of 13 properties owned by Paul, who was going into bankruptcy.

In March, Paxton agreed to a $3.3 million settlement with the deputies he allegedly fired for tipping off law enforcement about these events — money his office expected to be paid by the state legislature.

Instead, both bodies refused to pay. And underSpeaker Dade Phelan (R), the Texas House began an investigation.

Paxton fought against these charges with his usual pugnacity. He condemned them on Thursday as a politically motivated attack by “liberal Speaker Dade Phelan.”

The speaker, Paxton elaborated on Thursday, “wants nothing more than to sabotage our legal challenges to Biden’s extremist agenda by taking me out as the state’s Attorney General.”

As House proceedings warmed up on Friday afternoon, attorneys from Paxton’s office circulated briefs decrying the “unprecedented race to impeachment” by the House.

The attorneys argued that Paxton had been barred “every right and courtesy typically afforded to an accused in a system governed by the rule of law,” including the ability to call witnesses in his own defense.

But in documents delivered to the state House on Friday afternoon, members of the committee pushed back. Paxton, they argued, did not get criminal protection because he was not facing criminal charges.

The letter from the committee members further argued that both secrecy in the investigation and a speedy impeachment were necessary — not to punish Paxton, but to protect Texas from his future attempts to use his “significant power to further obstruct and delay justice.”

Finally, the committee suggested that Paxton had brought the investigation on himself: His request for the legislature to foot the bill for his settlement had been the last straw, the members said.

“We cannot over-emphasize the fact that, but for Paxton’s own request for a settlement over his wrongful conduct, Paxton would not be facing impeachment by the House,” they wrote.

Several prominent state and federal Republicans came to Paxton’s defense.

“This sham impeachment is the result of the Phelan leadership team empowering Democrats, allowing them to hold leadership positions and letting them control the agenda,” Matt Rinaldi of the Texas Republican Party wrote on Twitter Friday morning.

The proceedings, Rinaldi added, “are but the latest front in the Texas House’s war against Republicans to stop the conservative direction of our state.”

And former Trump aide Stephen Miller wrote on Thursday that “few in America have done more to advance the conservative legal movement, stop the lawless Biden executive onslaught, and defend our shared values” than Ken Paxton.

In the leadup to the House committee’s recommendation to impeach him, Paxton supporters had launched attacks against Phelan. On Tuesday, Paxton alleged that the speaker had failed to put forth conservative priorities because of his “debilitating intoxication,” after conservative social media accounts promoted a thirty-second video of Phelan tripping over his words while announcing a bill.

On Thursday, as the House General Investigations Committee withdrew to consider impeachment charges on the set of blockbuster allegations revealed against the attorney general a day earlier, a Paxton supporter out to The Hill to double down on the intoxication story. 

The email contained a photo of a man working a bar in an official-looking hallway, with the “Come and Take It” cannon flag visible over his left shoulder as he mixed drinks.

Conservative state Republicans — which in Texas have always included a large teetotaling Baptist contingent — have also pointed to the accusations about Phelan being intoxicated as a means of explaining why House Republicans haven’t passed a raft of Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and Dan Patrick’s (R) hard-right priorities.

“Alcoholism has run rampant throughout the Texas Legislature,” the Paxton supporter wrote to The Hill. “It’s disappointing and largely explains why no effective bills have been passed this session.”

The Hill has reached out to Phelan for comment. On Wednesday, the Speaker dismissed Paxton’s statement as “a last-ditch effort to save face.” 

Paxton’s multi pronged defense — and the willingness by Trump-aligned Republicans to accept it — comes amid a broader array of conflicts between Texas’s Republican leaders. 

That has spilled into a broader pileup in legislation due to ongoing disagreements between the state House — which Phelan had built into an independent bulwark against Patrick and Abbott — and the Senate, of which Patrick is the president and in which he exercises a great deal of authority.

Conservative Republicans are frustrated that the House has routinely mothballed conservative legislation sent by the Senate — or passed it in sufficiently watered-down form as to neuter its original intent.

In May, for example, the House passed a bill banning sexual performances in front of minors — a type of legislation other states have used to target all-ages drag shows, or events like drag queens reading stories at public libraries.

On its face, this looked like a victory for Patrick, for whom the bill had been a priority.

But unlike those other state bills, the final bill passed by the Texas House stripped the legislation of its specifically anti-drag language — which had originally defined “sexually explicit” to mean “a male performer exhibiting as a female, or a female performer exhibiting as a male,” the Texas Tribune reported.

Other conservative priorities that have stalled in the Texas legislature include a raft of energy bills that seek to disadvantage the state renewable energy industry — one of the crown jewels of Republican rule in Texas  — in favor of fossil fuels. 

There’s also a proposed school voucher system that would allow families to pull their money out of public schools along with their children — something that is anathema to even highly conservative rural districts, where public schools are a backbone of the community. 

In state House deliberations on Thursday, discontent in the body bloomed into open acrimony as bill after bill returned to the chamber from the Senate laden with new amendments — leading to angry calls by representatives that the body was being disrespected.

This reached such a pitch that one representative — presenting the Senate amendments on his own bill — pleaded with his colleagues not to “choose violence,” and begged them not to automatically vote his bill down.

The independent nature of the House has made the body a major obstacle to legislation considered must-pass by both Abbott and Patrick, and one significant unknown is whether the two — who have yet to speak publicly on the matter — will come to the attorney general’s defense.

On the one hand, Paxton has been their staunch ally — repeatedly suing blue states and the Biden administration for taking climate action or softening Trump-era immigration laws, and taking his pursuit of Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen so far that the Texas Bar Association filed an official misconduct claim against him.

At the same time, he has been increasingly viewed by state GOP leaders as an “embarrassment,” veteran Austin journalist Harvey Kronberg told The Hill. 

In the 2022 Republican primary, Texans for Lawsuit Reform, the state’s leading GOP Political Action Committee, supported his opponent, former state Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman.

That was a sign of broader frustration with Paxton among state GOP leaders — because the PAC is a key part of Abbott’s coalition, Kronberg said.

Whatever Abbott decides to do, the recommendation to impeach from the House commitee was a clear shot across the governor’s bow, Kronberg added.

The recommendation “is a middle finger salute to the governor and the lieutenant governor that establishes the independence of the house — and the fact that the House is not to be trifled with,” he said.