Texas House votes to impeach Ken
Irregular behavior of Attorney General Paul Paxton, whose mistress a political donor was sued during the impeachment
An impeachment would mean that Mr. Paxton would be temporarily removed from office pending a trial on the charges in the State Senate, where some of his closest allies, including his wife, would serve as jurors. The Senate proceedings could well be delayed until after the regular legislative session, which ends on Monday. The Senate could reconvene to hold the trial afterward, though the timing remains highly uncertain.
On Tuesday the House General Investigating Committee heard from investigators who said the attorney general engaged in illegal acts in order to protect a political donor.
The impeachment of Texas Governor was supported by the most prominent national voices in the Republican Party, such as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.
The articles of impeachment said that Mr. Paul gave a job to a woman described during the impeachment proceedings as Mr. Paxton’s mistress, and provided expensive home renovations.
David Spiller, a Republican member of the investigating committee, gave a speech to the house on Saturday saying that Attorney General Paxton had continuously and blatantly violated laws. “As a body we should not be complicit” in that behavior, he said. Texas is better than that.
In Friday’s press conference, Paxton doubled down calling the impeachment vote “illegal,” something his chief of litigation, Chris Hilton, told reporters Thursday.
But Texas law only says that public officials cannot be impeached “for acts committed before election to office,” and is not specific about which election.
A Conversation with Wisconsin Attorney General Warren Paxton Sr. during the 2015-2017 Congressional Sessions with the Senate Ethics Committee on Impeachment
“The House is poised to do exactly what Joe Biden has been hoping to accomplish since his first day in office – sabotage our work, my work, as Attorney General of Texas,” he said.
“There is no other state in this country that has the influence over the fate of our nation that I have,” he said.
Before he became the attorney general in 2015, Warren Kenneth Paxton Jr. worked as a lawyer and state legislator, serving in both the State House and Senate. His spouse, who was a political force, became a candidate in the State Senate.
He’s made a name for himself within the state by prosecuting a record number of Texans with voter fraud and for his legal opinion defining gender-affirming care as child abuse. His feuds with the federal government, both the Obama and Biden administrations in particular, have had a significant impact on his reputation nationally. He also tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
In 2015, his first year in that office, Mr. Paxton was charged with felonies related to securities fraud and booked in a county jail outside Dallas. The charges stemmed from accusations that Mr. Paxton had misled investors and clients — for example, by failing to tell investors that he would make a commission on their investment — while doing securities work in the years before he became attorney general.
A lawyer from Mr. Paxton’s office, Christopher Hilton, has said that the committee’s process in issuing the articles of impeachment had been “completely lacking,” and that the issues raised had been fully aired during Mr. Paxton’s successful re-election campaign last year.
Many of the charges related to the various ways that Mr. Paxton had used his office to benefit Mr. Paul, the committee said, and then fire those in the office who spoke up against his actions.
Mr. Paxton asked the Texas Legislature for the funds to pay the $3.3 million. Dade Phelan, the Republican House speaker, who is seen as a traditional conservative, did not support that use of state money. A House investigation was begun to gather information about the funding request.
According to legal filings in the case, the four aides had also relayed their concerns to the attorney general’s office; several weeks later, they were all fired. The aides filed suit, accusing him of retaliating against them.
At the time, Mr. Paxton said in a statement that he had “never been motivated by a desire to protect a political donor or to abuse this office, nor will I ever.”
Defending the Attorney General’s Innocence in a House Appropriate of a Democratic Candidate for Impeachment
The journalists were from Austin, Texas, and New York. David Montgomery lived in Austin and helped report.
Ilan Levin, 54, an associate director at an Austin nonprofit, stood beside his bicycle arguing with Mr. Paxton’s supporters. He held a cardboard sign that said, “IMPEACH!!!” He did not think that the vote would have a big impact.
Outside the Capitol a few people protested and confronted one another, while a few people protested and confronted another. “What he’s doing is the right thing, and the speaker is doing the wrong thing,” said a 76-year-old retired information systems manager from Austin, who declined to give his name.
“You keep hearing, ‘Why now?’” said Representative Terry Canales, a Democrat whose father, when he was a state representative, presented articles of impeachment against a district judge in 1975, the last time such a vote was taken. Mr. Canales stood at the front of the House chamber and lectured on the properness of doing the right thing.
Mr Smithee said that if he were ever to be involved in any impeachment proceedings that lead to the impeachment of an officer, he would not want to look like a Saturday mob out for an afternoon lynching.
Another Republican opponent, John Smithee, tried to offer an alternative for Republicans who might be on the fence: Vote no on Saturday, and come back for a “one-day hearing” where evidence could be fully presented and Mr. Paxton would have a chance to defend himself.
“I’m opposed to this resolution, not because I’m convinced of the attorney general’s innocence,” said one of the principal opponents, Brian Harrison, a Republican member of the House’s ultraconservative Freedom Caucus. But, he said, the process did not “adequately document his guilt” and he called it “a sham railroading of a political enemy.”
The committee itself did not consider evidence directly. The testimony from its investigators was the basis for the investigation, which began in March and included the attorney general’s office and others.
Sens. Geren and the Texas House of Representatives: Implications of the Texas Legislature’s First Appointment Action on Republican Political Prosecutors
Republican state Rep. Charlie Geren, a member of the House General Investigating Committee, said that several House lawmakers received telephone calls from Paxton personally threatening them with political consequences in their next election.
“For the last nine years, Ken has been the strongest conservative AG in the country,” Mr. Cruz wrote on Saturday. People are concerned about Ken’s legal challenges. But the courts should sort them out.”
After a four-hour proceeding before a packed gallery, the vote landed with titanic force in the Texas Capitol, where a statewide office holder had not been impeached in more than a century, since the Legislature voted to oust the sitting governor, James E. Ferguson, in 1917, for embezzlement and misuse of public funds.
The chair of the House investigating committee closed the meeting by urging his colleagues to impeach. “The evidence presented to you is compelling and is more than sufficient to justify going to trial,” he said, adding: “Send this to trial.”
The final vote was 121 members in favor of impeachment — a bipartisan coalition that included nearly every Democrat and a majority of the chamber’s Republicans — and 23 against, with two abstaining. The board in the front of the chamber was lit up with green lights as they voted. It went well beyond the 75 necessary.
“It was a hard one, a hard one, really hard,” Representative Jeff Leach, a Dallas-area Republican who voted in favor of impeachment, said after the vote.
The Texas Attorney General’s Case has Been Packed With Gop Conflict: a Reply to the Question of Greg Abbott
According to Texas law, Gov. Greg Abbott may appoint an interim attorney general, pending the Senate trial, but he is not required to. The spokesman for the office didn’t respond to the request about what he was going to do.
The lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, a conservative, will preside over the Senate trial. Mr. Patrick has maintained a neutral posture in public comments this week. Republicans have a 19-to-12 advantage in the Senate, which requires a two-thirds vote to convict.
The legislators, Texas officials and other political observers were shocked and confused by the fast pace of events, most of which they knew nothing about until recently.
Mr. Paxton said he is looking forward to a quick resolution of the case in the Texas Senate. He has friends and allies in the Senate, including his wife and personal friends.
He was elected to a third term last year even after the alleged offenses were prominently raised during the campaign, including by Republicans who ran against him in the primary election. He has accused the more moderate Republican leadership of the House of acting in concert with Democrats to oust him.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/05/27/us/texas-paxton-impeachment/the-current-session-of-the-texas-legislature-has-been-packed-with-gop-conflict
Rep. David Spiller: An Attorney General Investigates House Republican Attorney General Investigations of a Texaco-Paralegal at the House of Representatives
The night before, Mr. Paxton had appealed to his supporters to attend the House gallery. There were no outbursts or any efforts to disrupt the vote.
Even though he thinks she has a brilliant legal mind,Representative David Spiller told his members that he still violated the law.
“He put the interest of himself above the laws of the state of Texas,” Spiller said. “He put the interest of himself over his staff who tried to advise him on multiple occasions that he was about to violate the law.”
He denied any wrongdoings and termed the proceedings a “sham” and illegal. He’s also continued to claim the impeachment vote prevents him from protecting Texans from the federal government.
“Their plot imperials critical litigation my office has brought against the Biden administration to end the federal government’s attacks on our constitutional rights and the rule of law,” Paxton said Friday in front of reporters.
But Rep. Ann Johnson, a Democrat who sits on the investigating committee, said Paxton had already told his story on a document posted on his website in response to the complaints by the whistleblowers.
“One of the key responsibilities of the General Investigating Committee is to look beyond partisan affiliation in order to take the necessary steps to protect the institution that is our state and government,” Geren said. “We do just that today with this resolution.”
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/27/1178606035/ken-paxton-impeachment-texas-house-republican-attorney-general-investigation
Repented Texas House Speaker Paul Paxton During the Second Floor Mike the Black Hole: Impeachment isn’t a Defense
Ahead of Saturday’s vote, Republican members of the Texas House sent emails to their constituents asking them for support as they weighed whether to impeach Paxton.
During Saturday’s vote, lawmakers listened closely as members of the House General Investigating Committee laid out the 20 articles of impeachment against Paxton.
Paxton followed suit, House-hired investigators said, and circumvented his own agency’s policies to hire an outside attorney to intervene and issue subpoenas to benefit Paul.
“This House cannot legitimately, and in good faith, and under the rule of law, impeach General Paxton today on the record that it has before,” Smithee said.
“We’ll have to defend not only the final result that we reach today and the way we vote, but we’ll also have to defend the process by which this determination was made,” Smithee said. This process isn’t defensible to me.
