Been living under a rock lately? That would be the only excuse for not noticing that Ken Paxton is becoming outrageously and increasingly authoritative about suppressing the right to vote in Texas and getting Donald Trump elected. And that he wants to be the U.S. Attorney General in a Trump Administration.
It began back in 2019 with an attempt by the state of Texas to scrub voting rolls for noncitizens. That attempt was abandoned only after it jeopardized legitimate voter registrations and prompted three Federal lawsuits. There is no, and has never been, any evidence that large numbers of noncitizens vote or are registered to vote.
Then, Paxton was a major speaker in Trump’s stop the steal rally on January 6, 2021.
One month earlier, beset by a damning series of accusations of personal and professional wrongdoing, Paxton’s career seemed to be drowning. Then, he found a lifebuoy. Paxton filed a lawsuit arguing that Pennsylvania and three other states won by Joe Biden had harmed Texas by expanding mail and early voting access during the pandemic. He asked the Supreme Court to strip those states of their Biden electors and replace them with new ones, making Trump the victor of the 2020 election. It was soundly rejected by SCOTUS.
After 22,000 hours of investigative work, Paxton’s office had netted just 16 cases of voter fraud in 2020. That didn’t stop Paxton.
In 2021, a court ruled that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office has limited ability to prosecute voter fraud. Since then, his office’s work combating those crimes has slowed to a crawl, but according to the Houston Chronicle, the taxpayer money spent remains significant–$2.3 million with only four cases to show for it. To make a long story short, there is no massive voter fraud in Texas.
Now in 2024, Paxton is playing the illegal immigration voter strategy. Fast forward to the election integrity unit investigating a referral from Audrey Louis, district attorney in the Texas’ 81st judicial district, involving allegations of election fraud and vote harvesting; reports began to emerge that there were dawn raids with doors knocked down, computers, phones and documents confiscated and an 87 year old grandmother traumatized and in tears. It seemed like a remake of 1938 Germany’s Kristallnacht. Demands for an investigation by LULAC, angry recriminations by state lawmakers on Twitter and the news’ individual horror stories emerged shortly afterward.
A few days later, Greg Abbott doubled down by formally announcing that over a million Texas voters had been purged from the voting registration rolls and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a legal advisory on election integrity and launched an email tip line (illegalvoting@oag.texas.gov) where the public could report suspected violations of Texas election law.
Abbott and Paxton are trying to suppress the vote in the upcoming election by trying to give the impression that noncitizens and dead people will be voting. This is bullshit. The GOP knows that if Latinos vote in large numbers in November, they will lose. It was claimed and reported by Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo (same woman who started the Dominion voter machine rumor) that a huge number of noncitizens were registering to vote in Weatherford, Texas. Investigations showed this to be totally false. People die, people move, immigrants become naturalized citizens. None of these types of cases prove that someone voted illegally.
In the end, all of Paxton’s desperate efforts to get Trump to notice him have worked. In May, 2024, Trump said Ken Paxton would be a strong choice to run the Justice Department in a future Trump administration and that he would consider Paxton for the role of attorney general. “We have a lot of people who want that one and will be very good at it. But he’s a very talented guy,” Trump said.
Paxton’s mission was accomplished.
The bottom line is that the DOJ should be investigating all of this. How could someone as corrupt, incompetent, and extreme as Ken Paxton continue to get elected in the state of Texas? The Texas GOP has controlled Texas for 30 years and he’s one of them. Birds of a feather flock together and Paxton’s one of them. But as usual, Merrick Garland does nothing.
