Suspended Texas AG Ken Paxton (R-TX), currently on trial on impeachment charges of various sorts in the Texas Senate, earns the latest Earl “don’t confuse me with the facts!” Landgrebe nomination:
But as Paxton has aggressively pursued such [high-profile, anti-Biden and anti-Democratic] lawsuits, he has repeatedly declined to do a critical but less glamorous part of his job: represent state agencies in court.
Despite his role as Texas’ lead attorney, Paxton has denied representation to state agencies at least 75 times in the past two years, according to records obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. The denials forced some of those agencies to assume additional, unanticipated costs as they scrambled to secure legal assistance.
“Every time he backs out of one of these cases – and an agency, a university has to get outside counsel, if they get the funding approved – that’s costing the taxpayers a lot of extra money, because that’s one of the principal reasons the AG’s office exists, is to provide these basic legal services, basic legal defense,” said Chris Toth, former executive director of the National Association of Attorneys General.
Over the years, some of Paxton’s representation denials have become public. Among those is his longtime refusal to defend the state Ethics Commission against lawsuits filed by the now-disbanded Empower Texans, a political action committee, and the PAC’s then-head Michael Quinn Sullivan. Empower Texans contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to his campaign and loaned him $1 million, according to campaign finance reports. Another has been his choice not to represent the State Commission on Judicial Conduct after it issued a public warning to a justice of the peace who refused to perform same-sex marriages despite a U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized the unions. [The Texas Tribune]
At first glance, this may seem dubious evidence for a nomination, but give me a chance to validate it. First, as a reminder, the Earl Landgrebe nomination is for those individuals who have displayed absurd levels of allegiance to former President Trump.
Putting aside the fact that Paxton was lead AG in the notorious pro-Trump lawsuit Texas v. Pennsylvania, which asserted that Pennsylvania’s Electoral College votes were invalid because its voting methods were – allegedly – invalid, I assert that the activities for which Paxton is being tried, which include manipulating the State to the benefit of real estate investor Nate Paul, arranging for the woman he was cheating on his wife with to get a job with Nate Paul, are quite consistent with, and thus constitute praise and affirmation for, the numerous repugnant and anti-American activities of the former President.
So both in word and in deed, in multiple senses, Paxton has indicated admiration and allegiance to the former President, perhaps to a degree greater than his competitors, and thus deserves his nomination.
If the charges at the above link are proven true, I’d then have to say that Paxton has charged into his career choice – public official grifter – with abandon, and is certainly a bullshitter of the second water – not yet at the level of Trump, who appears to be unique in his ability to combine bullshitting with public appeal, but to a very respectable level. For those who wonder about the difference between a liar and a bullshitter, the most recent issue of Skeptical Inquirer has an article on the subject here.
