It's Not Just Paxton. They're All Unfit.
Texas Republicans' shameful support for a man they know is criminally unfit to serve makes them ALL equally unfit.
Who is surprised that barely a week after being formally accepted as the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate, Ken Paxton has been caught on video sneaking off to Iceland with his mother-of-seven mistress?
Certainly not any Republican colleague and party official in Texas.
He’s conned them, stole from them, and betrayed them at every level, yet they never fail to fall in line behind him when told. Paxton’s Icelandic escapade reminded them all of what they already know—he’s a liar, a cheater, and a thief. A man who has abused the power of every office he’s ever held. If you put the Ten Commandments next to his record, it would read like a rap sheet.
Swindled State House colleagues into investing in a fraudulent company.
Took bribes from sleazy friends under investigation by his own AG office.
Used taxpayer money to pay the legal settlement for the staff whistleblowers who turned him in.
And through it all, while presenting himself as a devout Christian, he engaged in serial sordid extramarital affairs.
None of this is news to Paxton’s colleagues or Party leaders. Most State House Republicans know about the over 3,000 pages of damning evidence of corruption and voted to impeach him. They even included a provision specifically stating that Paxton is unfit for office. They all know who Ken Paxton is, and they nominated him anyway.
And Paxton knows them, too. He knows that among current Texas Republicans neither fidelity, honesty, nor integrity are required. Hypocrisy is expected. Add audacity, and they admire you.
So of course Paxton swapped praise and prayer circles at the Republican convention for hooking up with his Septo-Mom mistress in geothermal pools and Viking saunas in Iceland.
The rest of us should save up any new outrage over Ken Paxton and aim it at Greg Abbott, Dan Patrick, and every other statewide, legislative, and local Republican on the ballot this fall. Their shameful support for a man they know is criminally unfit to serve makes them ALL equally unfit.
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And here's the question that never gets asked. Why are they in power? Why are they in power in the second largest state in the union? A state that is majority-minority, has a booming tech sector, and is more demographically close to California than South Carolina or Kansas?
And here is the answer. Groups like the Lone Star Project, who preached for years that the way to make Texas blue was to abandon the ex-urban and rural parts of the state, and just focus on boosting turnout in a handful of large Democratic counties. That wealthy suburban voters would start moving to the Democratic party in the droves because of social issues, when they continued to benefit from GOP tax and business polciies.
And what happened? Matt & company made the state a much darker shade of red. That's not an attack, that's a genunine observation. And it's not becuase they didn't have people around them that knew how to read the data, they just chose to ignore it in exchange for magical thinking.
And now that the Trump flags have dissapeared all over rural and ex-urban Texas (I know I live there), and there is a genuine opening in these communities for a candidate with broad appeal like James Talarico, there is ZERO infrastructure left, because people like Matt Angle used their influence with the Texas Democratic Party for years to just abandon those places and the millions of voters in them.
As someone who grew up on the Texas-New Mexico border, I once put a piece of research together for Matt Angle, showing how much higher hispanic turnout was in overwhelmingly hispanic rural counties on the New Mexico side of the border (which Udall represented) versus the Texas side of the border, which was represented by Mac Thornberry. It all came down to one thing: in New Mexico Democrats were organizing in those counties, and in Texas they were ignoring them.
Matt told me that those hispanic voters out there were "mostly non-citizens” which was categorically untrue, very few of Hispanics in those counties were non-citizens, and as someone who came from that part of the state, whose family literally help build that part of the state, I was aghast at how little he knew about that part of the state or cared about it.
Want to know how Ted Cruz narrowly defeated Beto? He hyper-organized and turned out the West Texas High Plains, the place that I showed Matt 15 years ago the Democrats needed to have an organizing presence in. Had he listened, Beto might have actually won. And that's again, a genuine observation based on the data.
Right now, people out here on the high plains are being crushed by tarriffs, ICE is arresting and terrorizing their workforce. AI data-centers are trying to take what's left of the water supply. Yet I haven't seen one Talarico sign out here, I haven't seen him do a single event since the primary, and I haven't seen a single ad or piece of mail from him.
Just because people have been around a long time, doesn't mean that they're right.