Ken Paxton's Impeachment and the Texas GOP

September sixteenth, twenty twenty-three. The Texas Senate chamber in Austin. Sixteen articles of impeachment against the state's top lawyer... and not one of them gets even a simple majority. Not one.

Wait. His own party was running that trial, right?

Republican House impeached him. Republican Senate acquitted him. And Attorney General Ken Paxton walks out and says, basically, four words... today, the truth prevailed.

Nothing like being found innocent by the people who indicted you.

Hold onto that room, because two and a half years later the same man is on a ballot this November, and it took exactly one phone call to put him there. I'll get to the phone call.

Okay, but back up. What did they impeach him for?

A man named Nate Paul. Austin real estate investor, a friend, a donor. In twenty nineteen Paxton's own top deputies look into Paul, they find bankruptcies and an FBI investigation, and they tell their boss... stay away from this guy.

And he stayed away.

House investigators say the next year Paxton told a deputy he didn't want his office helping the FBI's inquiry into Paul.

So what do the deputies do? Shrug and keep their heads down?

The opposite. Four of them, Brickman, Maxwell, Penley and Vassar, go to the FBI about their own attorney general. Then they're fired. Then they sue. Both Paxton and Paul have denied any wrongdoing.

His hand-picked deputies turned him in. That is not a normal Tuesday at the office.

And here's the detail that actually lit the fuse. To settle with them, Paxton asks the Texas House for three point three million dollars... of public money.

He asked the legislature to pay off the whistleblowers.

And the House said... how about we investigate you instead.

That's a spectacular own goal.

At trial his lawyer, Tony Buzbee, calls them so-called whistleblowers. Disgruntled employees. The Senate agrees. Four more articles get dismissed outright, and Paxton walks straight back into his office.

Hang on. Wasn't there a criminal case on him too? For, like, years?

Nine of them. Indicted in twenty fifteen, basically the week he took office. Securities fraud, over a tech startup called Servergy. The allegation: he talked investors, including a fellow Republican lawmaker, into at least a hundred thousand dollars of stock without disclosing he'd be paid for it.

Nine YEARS. How does a felony case just sit there?

Until March twenty twenty-four. Three weeks before trial, prosecutors cut a deal. No plea. Roughly three hundred thousand dollars in restitution, a hundred hours of community service, fifteen hours of legal ethics classes... and the charges go away.

Fifteen hours of ethics class. For the state's chief law enforcement officer.

He keeps the job. He keeps the law license. And politically? He comes out of the whole thing stronger than he went in.

So where does a guy like that go next?

Up. He goes after John Cornyn, Texas Republican royalty, for the Senate. August twenty twenty-five, Emerson has it Cornyn thirty, Paxton twenty-nine, thirty-seven percent undecided. First round, March third... Cornyn forty-two, Paxton forty-one. Runoff.

One point. So it's a street fight over turnout.

It was one phone call. A week before the runoff, Donald Trump endorsed Paxton. Final result... roughly sixty-four to thirty-six.

From one point to twenty-eight? That's not a primary, that's a demolition.

And Democrats looked at that and thought... finally. Impeached. Indicted. Nominated. Surely THIS is the year Texas goes blue.

I've heard that song. Every four years somebody promises me Texas is about to flip.

So let's do the receipts. Twenty twenty-four, Trump won Texas by thirteen point seven points, about one and a half million votes. In twenty twenty, that margin was six hundred thirty-one thousand. It more than doubled.

That is the wrong direction.

The border is where it's starkest. Starr County, ninety-seven percent Hispanic, voted Republican for president for the first time since eighteen ninety-two. Maverick swung about twenty-eight points right. Hidalgo: Clinton took sixty-five percent in twenty sixteen, Biden fifty-six, and in twenty twenty-four Trump carried it.

And for a decade people told me demography was destiny.

The suburbs didn't save them either. Collin, Republican by four to Republican by eleven. Denton, eight to thirteen. Tarrant flipped back. Harris won twelve counties statewide. Biden won twenty-two.

Okay, so is there ANY honest case for competitive?

There is. Tarrant is a genuine knife's edge. Dallas, Bexar, Travis, Harris still vote Democratic. And look at the runoff polling... the University of Houston found half of Republican primary voters viewed Paxton favorably, forty-three percent unfavorably, with the researchers warning the party might struggle to unify behind the winner.

So the war that made him is the thing that could cost him.

And there's a thumb on the scale. In twenty twenty-five Texas redrew its congressional map mid-decade, aiming for as many as five new Republican seats. A three-judge panel in El Paso called it a racial gerrymander. The Supreme Court, six to three, let it stand for this November.

The referee moved the lines before kickoff.

Which is why this isn't really a story about one man's legal troubles. The old theory said Texas changes when its people change. Twenty twenty-four said something harder... voters move faster than demographics do.

Nobody gets to assume who belongs to them.

Two things are true at once. Texas is further from flipping than it was eight years ago... and the party that runs it just spent three years at war with itself, in public, under oath. One of those gives first. That's the whole election.