It was also a warning shot, and it worked to devastating effect. After eight hours of “deliberation,” the Texas Senate on Saturday acquitted Paxton of all 16 charges of bribery, unfitness for office and abuse of office on which the Republican-controlled House had overwhelmingly voted to impeach him in May.
Paxton’s chief accusers had been a cadre of his former aides who were fired when they reported him to the FBI for using state resources on behalf of a friend and political benefactor. Paxton was audacious enough to ask Texas taxpayers to foot the bill for the $3.3 million out-of-court settlement he reached with the whistleblowers.
That the fix was in for the attorney general in the Senate probably should have been apparent back in July. That’s when a campaign finance report revealed that a pro-Paxton political action committee, known as the Defend Texas Liberty PAC, had donated $1 million and made an additional $2 million loan to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who would preside over the impeachment trial.
Yes, you read that right: The person acting as judge took $3 million from the defendant’s deep-pocketed allies. Was it any wonder that only two Republicans in the Senate, where the lieutenant governor serves as president of the chamber, voted to convict?
And what, you might reasonably ask, does any of this have to do with the Bushes?
Last year, Paxton easily defeated a member of the clan, former land commissioner George P. Bush, who had challenged him in the GOP primary.
But that hardly merits a footnote in the political dynamic in Texas today. More significant is what the “Bush era” once represented. When George H.W. Bush moved his young family to the state to try his luck in the oil business, being a Republican was as much of a political liability as being a New England Yankee. With those two strikes against him, Bush the elder failed in both his bids for the U.S. Senate, in 1964 and 1970, though he managed to win a House seat in Houston twice.
Still, the state was changing. A wave of corporate relocations helped bring a growing market for business-oriented candidates who could speak to the moderate impulses of suburban voters. The first real sign of a big realignment in Texas came in 1978, when businessman Bill Clements was elected as the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction.
But it was George W. Bush, with a battle plan devised by strategist Karl Rove, who really closed the deal with his election to governor in 1994. Not once since then has a Democrat won any statewide office in Texas.
How Bush governed, working closely and cordially with top Democrats, including Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock and House Speaker Pete Laney, was a big part of his appeal. For a while, the state legislature remained a place where pragmatism could win out over partisanship — so long as the oil and banking interests were taken care of.
All of that effectively ended in 2012, when Ted Cruz, a former solicitor general who had been considered a long shot, rode the tea party wave and crushed then-Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst in the Republican U.S. Senate primary. From then on, the message to Texas Republicans was never to allow an opponent to get to their right. The years that followed saw the state turning sharply to the right on issues — most conspicuously immigration, for which Texans once had a live-and-let-live mentality.
Paxton’s far-right forces are now promising all-out warfare on the Republican House members — starting with Speaker Dade Phelan — who tried to remove the attorney general from office. And with Paxton supporter Donald Trump likely to be at the top of the ticket next year, you’d have to give them excellent odds of prevailing.
But, as always, follow the money to see whether there is any pushback from what remains of the Republicans’ old guard. And whether Democrats have learned enough from their failures to start offering candidates more capable of appealing to a right-leaning electorate.
Texas has become an object lesson of what happens when one party becomes entrenched enough to operate solely on the basis of its own extremist impulses. As Texas Monthly noted last year, Republican primaries in the state are generally low-turnout affairs, which means that often just 3 percent of its citizens are calling the shots for everyone else.
Yes, the Republicans who run Texas are willing to stand on principle. Unfortunately, that principle is doing whatever it takes to cling to power.
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