The morning after information broke that Texas Home Democrats deliberate to return to the state, successfully ending their efforts to dam Republicans from redrawing the state’s congressional maps, Lawyer Basic Ken Paxton took a victory lap.
The firebrand conservative ally of President Donald Trump had used his workplace to wage a number of authorized battles in opposition to the absent Democrats directly, drawing outsized consideration as he challenges Sen. John Cornyn in subsequent 12 months’s Republican Senate main.
Paxton requested the state Supreme Court docket to expel 13 of them from workplace. He requested an Illinois court docket to assist implement the Texas Home speaker’s civil arrest warrants for the Democrats who had holed up exterior Chicago. And he obtained a court docket order stopping former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke’s political motion committee from elevating cash to help these boycotting Democrats. Then, he claimed O’Rourke violated that court docket order and sought his arrest.
On Wednesday morning, Paxton mentioned his technique labored: Democrats deliberate to finish their quorum-breaking effort sooner than they’d in earlier standoffs, together with 2003 and 2021.
“The concept of placing strain on them from completely different angles — I believe it obtained to them. As a result of they definitely got here again sooner than they’ve prior to now,” Paxton advised conservative discuss radio host Mark Davis.
Paxton’s actions, and his feedback within the radio interview, supplied a window into how one of many nation’s most controversial attorneys basic has lengthy operated. He has pushed authorized boundaries — riling up conservatives and utilizing the courts to position himself on the heart of political fights with nationwide penalties, even when his lawsuits have little probability of success.
The three-term lawyer basic’s willingness to wage these battles has earned him deep assist amongst conservatives — together with these within the state Senate who acquitted him two years in the past, after the Republican-dominated Home had impeached him over allegations of corruption and bribery.
It has additionally alienated many Democrats and a few reasonable Republicans — and it’s why Democrats consider the state’s Senate race might turn into aggressive subsequent fall if Paxton ousts Cornyn within the GOP main. The swirl of controversy surrounding Paxton intensified final month, when his spouse, state Sen. Angela Paxton, filed for divorce, alleging infidelity.
Nonetheless, as his main in opposition to Cornyn looms, Paxton has successfully silenced his Republican critics because the get together waged a strain marketing campaign to return the absent Home Democrats to Texas. And he did so utilizing instruments unavailable to Cornyn — who requested US Lawyer Basic Pam Bondi to research the supply of the Democrats’ funding, however couldn’t launch his personal probe.
Paxton is “one of the crucial revolutionary AGs when it comes to utilizing his workplace for advancing his political imaginative and prescient,” mentioned Paul Nolette, a professor and the director of Marquette College’s Les Aspin Middle for Authorities who has written extensively about attorneys generals’ use of their workplaces to affect nationwide coverage.
“What’s new and weird is that he’s actually been the one who has modeled tips on how to use instruments that don’t, on their face, appear partisan, for larger partisan impact,” Nolette mentioned.
Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court docket analyst and professor at Georgetown College Regulation Middle, mentioned that amongst authorized consultants, “I believe everybody views Paxton the identical method — as somebody who will cease at nothing to make use of and abuse his workplace to advance no matter he views because the partisan political crucial of the second.”
“He views himself much less because the lawyer basic of Texas than because the lawyer basic of the Republican Occasion,” Vladeck mentioned. “And which will endear him to the parents who vote for him and who his actions profit, but it surely definitely isn’t constant along with his constitutional, statutory and moral duties and obligations to all the individuals of Texas.”
After 12 years within the Texas legislature, Paxton was elected lawyer basic in 2014. Throughout his first two years in workplace — the final two years of Barack Obama’s presidency — Paxton filed 27 lawsuits in opposition to the Obama administration.
He initiated a lawsuit searching for to have Obama’s signature home achievement, the Inexpensive Care Act, declared unconstitutional — an effort the Supreme Court docket rejected.
Paxton was extra profitable battling Obama’s immigration reforms, blocking the implementation of a coverage that may have granted deferred motion to undocumented immigrants who’ve lived in the US since 2010 and have youngsters who’re Americans or lawful everlasting residents.
He additionally fought Obama’s administration over environmental protections, water laws, time beyond regulation coverage, hiring guidelines for felons and extra. He led 13 states that gained an injunction halting the Obama administration’s steerage for faculties on transgender college students’ rest room entry.
Maybe Paxton’s most audacious authorized transfer got here in 2020, when he filed a post-election lawsuit in opposition to 4 presidential battleground states — Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — the place President Joe Biden had defeated Trump. He alleged in a press release that these states’ actions to develop voter entry throughout the coronavirus pandemic had forged “a darkish shadow of doubt over the result of the whole election.” The Supreme Court docket shortly denied the lawsuit, ruling that Texas lacked standing.
Throughout Biden’s time period, Paxton once more frequently challenged the Democratic administration in court docket. His workplace bragged in a November 2024 information launch that it had filed its a hundredth lawsuit in opposition to Biden’s administration. Paxton mentioned in a press release on the time that “the federal authorities has been ruthlessly weaponized in opposition to the American individuals. However Texas stood of their method.”
He challenged Biden’s immigration insurance policies, together with profitable a ruling blocking Biden’s “parole in place” coverage that gave authorized standing to sure undocumented people who’re married to US residents.
He unsuccessfully challenged the Biden administration’s coronavirus vaccine mandate and later launched investigations into the pharmaceutical drug makers who manufactured vaccines.
With Trump again in workplace, Paxton has continued to wage cultural battles by focusing on blue states.
In December, Paxton sued a New York physician for prescribing abortion drugs to a lady close to Dallas — one of many first challenges to protect legal guidelines enacted by Democratic-controlled states to guard docs within the wake of Roe v. Wade’s overturning. Then, in July, he sued a New York county clerk for failing to levy a effective imposed in Texas when that physician didn’t present up for court docket. The fits are ongoing.
He has additionally returned to a problem Trump raised always throughout the 2024 marketing campaign: allegations of voter fraud. Paxton’s workplace mentioned in a information launch final month it had “launched a sweeping investigation into greater than 100 potential noncitizens who forged over 200 ballots within the 2020 and 2022 election cycles.”
Nolette mentioned Paxton has “used the very ample instruments of the AG’s workplace to most impact.”
He pointed to Paxton’s focusing on of a migrant shelter in El Paso by demanding its consumer data, his use of client safety legal guidelines to probe pharmaceutical drug-makers, hospitals that supplied gender-affirming care to minors and extra.
“He’s actually been a frontrunner in utilizing these nearly bread-and-butter instruments of the workplace, that are usually for run-of-the-mill instances on the state degree or noncontroversial, bipartisan points, and utilizing these in a extra sharply partisan method,” Nolette mentioned.
