Monday, July 24, 2023

You Gotta Dance With The One What Brung Ya

 Until you can't:

And, until last month, no state politician had received more money from those groups [on "a long-term crusade to push Texas to the extreme right"] than [Texas AG Ken] Paxton, who has in turn used his office to push ultraconservative priorities while declining to defend state agencies in numerous lawsuits filed by groups connected to Dunn and the Wilks brothers, including those seeking to undermine the state’s campaign finance laws.

Now, with the clock ticking toward Paxton’s September impeachment trial before the Texas Senate, Stickland and his far-right friends are fighting hard and spending big to protect their most important ally — and to stave off a major loss amid their ongoing fight for control of the Texas GOP.

One more surprise in the impeachment of Ken Paxton:  who is against him, v. who is behind him.

And it's all because Dems are in disarray:

The Paxton drama comes at a crucial time for the state’s ultraconservative wing, which has been increasingly criticized by moderate Republicans who have grown weary of their purity tests and attacks even as the state drifts further to the right. The Wilks and Dunn orbit also has been hobbled by a series of divisive, costly — and largely unsuccessful — primary races and the removal of former Rep. Bryan Slaton, whose political life was subsidized by Defend Texas Liberty until he was expelled from the House in May for having sex with a 19-year-old aide he got drunk.

Those losses, coupled with intraparty animus, have raised the groups’ stakes in the Paxton trial. 

Paxton's trial is political, IMHO, in that the House cannot overlook Paxton's corruption any longer.  It is too blatant and too prolonged and too damned public.  The FBI has already arrested Paxton's BFF that he did all the criming for.  Smart money says the FBI will arrest Paxton after the impeachment trial, whether he wins or loses it.

Art. 4 of the Texas Constitution provides:

Sec. 22.  ATTORNEY GENERAL.  The Attorney General shall represent the State in all suits and pleas in the Supreme Court of the State in which the State may be a party, and shall especially inquire into the charter rights of all private corporations, and from time to time, in the name of the State, take such action in the courts as may be proper and necessary to prevent any private corporation from exercising any power or demanding or collecting any species of taxes, tolls, freight or wharfage not authorized by law.  He shall, whenever sufficient cause exists, seek a judicial forfeiture of such charters, unless otherwise expressly directed by law, and give legal advice in writing to the Governor and other executive officers, when requested by them, and perform such other duties as may be required by law.   

Let's go a bit deeper than that:

Attorney General Ken Paxton is the lawyer for the State of Texas and is charged by the Texas Constitution to:

defend the laws and the Constitution of the State of Texas

represent the State in litigation

approve public bond issues

To fulfill these responsibilities, the Office of the Attorney General serves as legal counsel to all boards and agencies of state government, issues legal opinions when requested by the Governor, heads of state agencies and other officials and agencies as provided by Texas statutes, sits as an ex-officio member of state committees and commissions, and defends challenges to state laws and suits against both state agencies and individual employees of the State.

The Office of the Attorney General has taken on numerous other roles through the years. Texas statutes contain nearly 2000 references to the Attorney General. In addition to its constitutionally prescribed duties, the Office of the Attorney General files civil suits upon referral by other state agencies. In some circumstances, the Attorney General has original jurisdiction to prosecute violations of the law, but in most cases, criminal prosecutions by the Attorney General are initiated only upon the request of a local prosecutor. 

Now, specifically, the Attorney General doesn't do any of that.  The Office of the Attorney General does all that work, in court and out, through a staff of lawyers and others staffing the office.  But the Texas Constitution is quite clear: "The Attorney General shall represent the State in all suits and pleas in the Supreme Court of the State in which the State may be a party...."  This means, in practice, that Ken Paxton's name is on any court pleading filed by the State of Texas in state or federal court.  But only lawyers can put their names on pleadings.  More specifically, only licensed lawyers may do so.

Licensed lawyers in the State of Texas cannot have criminal convictions.

Now there's a lot of slipperiness here.  I don't have the resources to research this legal question, and it may well be the Courts have interpreted Section 22 of Art 4 of the Texas Constitution to mean the AG may not be a lawyer, although clearly his office staff must.  But that's rather like putting a non-lawyer in charge of a lawfirm, something the law does not allow.  Non-lawyers can operate the business side of a lawfirm, but they cannot direct firm lawyers in their practice.  Lawyers are rather jealous of their licensed status, especially because they are the ones responsible for what is done in their names and, at least in Texas, under color of their Bar numbers (Texas pleadings require a lawyer signing the pleadings to include her/his Bar card number, so it's literally "over" their Bar number that they sign.)

So, and it's a series of "ifs" at this point, if the FBI charges Paxton (how could they not?), and Paxton loses the criminal trial or even takes a plea deal, the State Bar of Texas is going to want his license back.  And then one wonders if Ken Paxton could be re-elected as the crooked Attorney General of Texas?

All by way of saying these right-wing billionaires who think Barry Goldwater was a pinko (look it up, punks!) and LeMay should have just nuked North Vietnam, may have already lost.  Because even if they win the impeachment trial by blackmailing the jury (what?  Paxton's own lawyers have already tried to disqualify three Democratic Senators for bias, even though the Texas Constitution says they all must attend the trial.  Paxton's own wife is a State Senator and will attend the trial; she just won't be allowed to vote because of the obvious conflict of interest. But Paxton's lawyers don't get to pick the jury for this trial; the Texas Constitution has already done that.), they can't browbeat a US Attorney and a federal judge and jury.  And if Paxton is convicted of a crime, the State Bar of Texas will sue to remove his license instanter.  And they'll win.

And there go a few more of the dreams of the crazy rich oil guys in Texas.  

Alternatively, Paxton loses his trial, because the State Senators know the one thing they DON'T do is vote for corruption.  Texas voters will vote for crazy.  They won't stand for corruption.  If you're old enough to remember Tom DeLay, he was Gingrich's hatchet man and majority whip when Bill Clinton was POTUS, and DeLay was ruthless in using his power against his enemies, who were mostly Democrats.  And then some pictures of DeLay living it up in a hot tub (no, I'm not making this up) surfaced, and DeLay declined to even run for re-election that year.  He explicitly said his voters wouldn't stand for any hint of misconduct, a term found, as ever, in the eye of the beholder.

State voters in Texas will feel the same way about Paxton, and Texas state senators know it.  They can save Paxton, or they can save themselves.  They can't do both.  And the threats of the right-wing billionaires to fund extremists in primaries?  That would probably get some moderate Democrats elected.

I think the extremists have caught the car, and they don't know what to do about it.  It ain't everything, but it ain't nothin', either. Besides:

For six years, Zachary Maxwell saw firsthand how West Texas oil money slowly reshaped the state’s political landscape — including through the numerous conservative campaigns he helped lead and, later, as chief of staff for former Rep. Mike Lang, the leader of the House’s ultraconservative Freedom Caucus. He also briefly worked for the Empower Texans-affiliated Texas Scorecard as a staff writer.

Maxwell ultimately left that world because of what he said was hypocrisy from the Dunn and Wilks cohort, who he said were almost singularly focused on conservative “chest beating” as a means of pulling the party’s mainstream views to the right and accumulating political power.

“It is rules for thee, not for me,” he said of Empower Texans and its affiliated groups, including Defend Texas Liberty. “They do not care about how Austin is run — they care about running Austin. They care about who can scream the loudest, and usually that ends up being people with the least amount of integrity. And the entire Legislature is sick and tired of it. Nothing is good enough. And the second you get off course, you’re going to get hammered.”

The reference to "Austin" is a loose one.  In this context, it means the Legislature when it is in session, which is only for six months every two years.  The impact of the Lege on the city of Austin, outside of downtown (where the capitol is located) is negligible, to nuisance.  The telling point is the last:  "...the entire Legislature is sick and tired of it."  I think the country at large is sick of MAGA and it's "I SCREAM LOUDER MEANS I WIN!" attitude.  So the expectation that the State Senate is not inclined to save Ken Paxton, is not without foundation.  Here's another telling quote:

“They [the billionaires] romanticize the rural Texan,” Brandon Darby, editor of Breitbart Texas, a right-wing news site that had previously employed Sullivan, said at the time. “They wear the hat, the boots and the Wrangler jeans, but their policies actually strangle rural Texas communities.”

The session ended with no funding for public schools in part because the voucher program to allow public money to be spent at private schools, didn't pass either.  Most of the resistance to that plan came from rural Texas, where there are no private schools to flee to, and the public schools are a source of community pride and employment.  So, yeah, the policies of these extreme right-wingers is damaging to rural Texas as much as it is to the rest of Texas; and the people in rural Texas aren't fools.

Which raises the question of what Ken Paxton has done for them lately.  It also raises the question of who Paxton is working for: 

Just an example of one of Paxton's pet projects.  Probably not too many people in rural Texas love Joe Biden.  Then again, they liked LBJ, and know the difference between politicians who use them as props, and politicians who actually help them.  Biden is closer to LBJ, so don't write them off prematurely.  Still, Paxton is only winning the applause of a handful of rich cranks with lawsuits like this, and this one is clearly no longer interesting to him since he couldn't get it assigned to the crank judge he prefers.  That's another grain of sand on the scales, but Paxton doesn't need any more weight added to that side of the scales right now.

In the end, this all comes down to Paxton trying to dig into the state coffers for $3.3 million to pay off a mess of his own creation.  In a session that ended without funding public education at all (beyond standing allocations from prior sessions), and took two special sessions to finally pass a property tax decrease (obviously a political prize, but you still have to pay for schools, roads, police, and fire somehow; and Texas doesn't not have another source of tax income bigger than property taxes), that number is small enough and, simultaneously, big enough, to mean something to voters.

And the Senators of the State of Texas are well aware of it.
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