A Swamp Critter

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton

In a year of Sunday mornings we could not meet all the mini-Trumps whose unchecked power and corruption in their states put the regional Sultans of the Ottoman Empire to shame. Most of these local swamp monsters gained power and keep it by a combination of donor cash and rightwing gerrymandering. Like their role model in Mar a Lago, indictments and public revelations of fraud, hush money, pay to play schemes and abuses of power do not destroy them. On the contrary, legal charges and media coverage of their deeds excites their followers and engorges them with Olympian impunity.

We don’t have world enough or time for all, but a few deserve attention. Today we’ll venture down to Houston, into deadly heat bulb territory, where a king of these beasts has a lair: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Last week, Texas Governor Greg Abbott quietly appointed a member of his own staff as interim attorney general to replace Paxton as he awaits an impeachment trial in September on 20 charges including bribery and abuse of office. Abbott surely acted reluctantly and with regret. Since getting elected in 2015, Paxton has been playing Costello to Abbott, engaging in performative extremism and together with the state’s oil oligarchs, maintaining Texas as the national HQ of forced birth, caged migrants and worship of fossil fuels that are turning their state and ultimately our planet into a boiling hell-hole.

Abbott and his Costello (Paxton)

Abbott’s antics are well known. Before he started busing migrants to Kamala Harris’ lawn and dumping them without notice in northern U.S. cities, he sued the Obama administration over Obamacare 39 times. As a partner in taxpayer-funded performative extremism, Abbott will surely miss Paxton, who has sued the Biden administration more than a dozen times over immigration rules. Paxton has engaged in numerous MAGA legal assaults on progressive policies. He is - or was - a prominent and active member of the Republican Attorney Generals Association (RAGA).

The RAGA (funded by the Leonard Leo network, see previous “Dark Money King” issue) systematically challenges abortion rights, environmental protection and climate change policies in courts. RAGA’s lawsuits work in tandem with Trump-appointed extremist judges, whose services they can “venue-shop" under an absurd system that allows them to pick districts where they will file suit.

RAGA recently got a Trump appointed judge to issue an outrageous ruling barring the federal government from communicating with Silicon Valley media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. The suit grew out of the post Big Lie rightwing conspiracy theory that tech titans silence the “free speech” of neo-Nazis and vaccine deniers and of course, Trump.

Paxton’s political style is proud Banana Republic. For seven of the eight years he’s been the state’s top law enforcement officer, he has been under federal indictment for fraud.

In 2015, a Texas grand jury indicted Paxton on two counts of securities fraud, a first-degree felony with a possible sentence of up to 99 years in prison, and one count of failing to register with state securities regulators, a third-degree felony with a maximum 10 years in prison. The alleged scheme involved defrauding investors in tech start-up.

Since then, he has dodged not just shackles but courtroom, discovery, trial, all while under indictment. For seven years. No one seems to know how he pulled it off. Like Trump, he has cash, lawyers, friends of judges and friends of lawyers. Lawyers have executed a series of delay maneuvers, battling to the state’s top court over whether the trial should be in his home county near Dallas or in Houston, where he has fewer pals. (Judges have finally ruled that he must go to trial in Houston.)

While under indictment, according to impeachment charges, he racked up a record of impunity, using his office to stop foreclosures on donor Nate Paul’s properties, leaning on his staff to write legal opinions favorable to Paul, firing them for whistleblowing, and then blowing $3.3 million of taxpayer money to settle with them.

How can a man accused of major federal crimes remain in a powerful public office for seven years, raking in donor cash and, according to impeachment articles, paying back the donor with myriad favors?

That is a question other American criminals, tried, shackled, or in prison cells must be asking. One of those wondering has to be Nate Paul, the Paxton donor who in addition to financing his political ambitions, allegedly paid off Paxton’s secret girlfriend with a job, and slid his personal AG mucho dolares for home renovations. Indicted in June on charges of mortgage fraud, Paul wore shackles to his court appearance, and has been forced to hand over his passport.

Abbott and Paxton have been re-elected multiple times. A majority of Texas voting taxpayers don’t seem to mind their money blown on suing Washington, performances that Abbott and friends can bray about on Fox. Paxton’s wife, a state Senator, campaigned for office singing a song with the lyrics "I'm a pistol-packing mama whose husband sues Obama." 

Bending the law to the breaking point is a hallmark of MAGA politics. Crime-ing in office is a way for leaders in autocratizing systems to implicate associates and increase control over their fiefdom. Historian Ruth Ben Ghiat, explores this phenomenon in her excellent book about 20th Century autocrats, Strongmen. “Corruption is a process as well as a set of practices, and the word’s Latin and Old French origins imply a change of state due to decay,” she writes. “This notion of corruption captures the operation of strongmen regimes. They turn the economy into an instrument of leader wealth creation, but also encourage changes in ethical and behavioral norms to make things that were illegal or immoral appear acceptable.” she writes.

Criminal charges like those Paxton and Trump now fight, also add a luster of victimization to the MAGA politician. “All strongmen since Mussolini say they’re victims. And this is very compelling to their followers, because they feel protective of them, and this is part of their leader cult,” Ben Ghat has said.

OTHER BUSINESS: NADA NDAA

I had intended to write this week’s issue on Tommy Tuberville, the lunk U.S. Senator from Alabama, former football coach, and minor MAGA fraudster whose eponymous charity for veterans spent just 18 percent of its income on charity (unless you count golf club memberships dinners as charitable.)

Tuberville stepped up last week as the pink face of one of the House Republicans’ 80 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) Amendments - the one that would prevent the government from flying pregnant servicewomen to states with legal abortion. I decided not to feature Tuberville because he has been featured all week on sub stacks, including by Lucian Truscott IV and Judd Legum.

Now, the House has passed the NDAA with 80 anti-”woke,” homophobic, anti-China amendments and sent the bill to the Senate. There, many, but maybe not all of these riders will likely be peeled off. One in particular, overlooked by mainstream coverage, is so outrageous it deserves mention: an Ohio Christian nationalist MAGA pol tacked on an amendment that forbids members of the military from communicating with members of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF). The Foundation logs and formally objects to numerous acts of Christian nationalist proselytizing of servicemen and women. This assault on free speech and the secular American military deserves strong opposition.

Beyond the racist and sexist amendments, the real outrage is the bloated defense budget itself. The NDAA allocates $816 billion to the greatest war machine in human history. That’s more than the next ten countries’s defense budgets combined. The center and left are rightly disgusted at the House Freedom Caucus extremists for adding their racist and sexist crap to the bill, slowing it down, and not showing “support for our troops.” Progressives and decent centrists in Congress would do well to take a look at this playbook and go after the spending itself. It’s not untouchable.

Related reading

Paxton impeachment

Paxton long fraud case

Nate Paul in shackles

Strongmen by Ruth Ben Ghiat

MRFF amendment

Recommended sub stacks on Tuberville Popular Information and Truscott

US defense spending