Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton with former President Donald Trump during a rally on the eve of last November’s election in Robstown, Texas (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
A very rare decision once again highlights the divisions within the Republican Party
On Saturday, May 27, the Texas House of Representatives voted to impeach Attorney General Republican Ken Paxton. The news would be relevant in itself — the Attorney General is one of the most important posts in American state institutions, a sort of Attorney General with the power to initiate investigations and bring people and companies to justice, and Texas is one of the most important and influential in the United States — but it is made even more remarkable by the fact that it was Republican lawmakers who formally indicted Paxton, his fellow party members.
The list of allegations against Paxton by the House General Investigation Committee — the Texas House committee that recommended impeachment — was released at the end of an investigation secretly authorized by the committee itself last March. The prosecutor’s suspicions include accepting bribes from a real estate developer and political financier, Nate Paul; that he in turn misused public funds for Paul’s benefit; and for convincing an entrepreneur and former politician to invest $100,000 in a tech company in 2011 without telling them he would receive a commission in return. The allegations formalized facts that came to light largely thanks to journalistic research and testimonies from former Paxton assistants, but have only been partially investigated.
Paxton denied all allegations and called the impeachment proceedings against him “illegal”; Some of his supporters also criticized the timing of the vote, which took place the weekend before Memorial Day, a day dedicated to commemorating US soldiers who died in the war and considered an important moment of national unity.
Impeachment is a process that will begin no later than late August with hearings in the Texas Senate, where a two-thirds majority of members will be required to remove Paxton from office. The position of Attorney General – the highest judicial office in the state – is among the most important in the Texas political system and is seen as an opportunity to seek more prominent political positions. To date, only two people in Texas, a governor in 1917 and a judge in 1975, have been removed from office following an impeachment trial.
The vote in the House of Representatives on Saturday was unequivocal and non-partisan: out of a total of 150 MPs, all Democrats present and 60 of the 85 Republicans voted for impeachment. What surprised many observers was not so much the alignment between the two factions as the vast majority of Republican lawmakers who chose to vote against Paxton: all in a party known, especially in Texas, as particularly corporate and monolithic.
During the last term, Republican members of the House of Representatives – and Speaker Dade Phelan in particular – were accused by the party’s more extremist wing of being too close to Democrats and neglecting, for example, political struggles to limit voting rights and minority voting rights. On the other hand, the vote in the Senate, whose members represent more radical positions than in the Chamber, is less certain; The Texas Tribune wrote that there is a great deal of secrecy about their voting intentions among the 31 senators, including 12 Democrats, although most have numerous political and personal ties to Paxton (Paxton’s wife is a senator).
Paxton has served as Texas Attorney General since 2014, after being re-elected twice more, in 2018 and 2022. Over the years he has taken particularly radical stances, particularly on immigration, and has become popular with more conservative Republican voters, earning the respect and support of former US President Donald Trump and well-known Senator Ted Cruz. In 2015 and 2018, as leader of a broad coalition of conservative-majority states, he sued the federal government and helped block some programs of the Biden and Obama administrations in favor of some categories of irregular immigrants, such as those with children. Paxton also tried to get the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare,” Obama’s famous healthcare bill) repealed by suing the federal government again, but unsuccessfully, and relaxing some gun restrictions.
It’s not yet clear whether the Paxton affair could anticipate national political trends within the Republican Party. Most local political commentators argue that by removing Paxton as soon as possible, the party’s main objective is to get rid of him to avoid the major media and political scandal that would inevitably result from further spreading of news of his allegations given his very fragile position . The more extremist, identitarian component and less connected to the “historical” issues of the party to which Paxton belongs (like market deregulation and free enterprise) is currently very influential in much of the United States: it is possible for a prosecutor to be removed remains a material fact, but its impact is limited to Texas only.
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