Texas Scorecard by Daniel Greer | May 15, 2024
Texans for Lawsuit Reform’s history of moving against Ken Paxton culminated in a failed impeachment. Had it succeeded, it could have established a playbook for nullifying the power of Texas voters.During the impeachment trial of the Attorney General of Texas in September 2023, Tony Buzbee cross-examined Ken Paxton’s former employee turned hapless informant.
You were involved in staging a coup, weren’t you? That’s what you were up to. That’s the reason you went to the governor’s office, that’s the reason you were talking to TLR, that’s the reason you were engaged in conduct like removing your boss’s name from agency letterhead, you were staging a coup.
This spirited moment early in the trial followed the rushed impeachment of Attorney General Paxton by the Texas House at the end of the legislative session. Less than a week after Buzbee’s cross of the rogue employee, the Texas Senate acquitted Paxton.
Following the trial, Buzbee appeared on a podcast.
After he described the House’s weak case, Buzbee explained the dangers of a weaponized impeachment process. Someone could be elected statewide, then impeached and removed from office. This would be done through a process that bypassed the voters. “It would come down to 30 people, 31 people in the Senate deciding statewide officials,” Buzbee said.
In an interview with Texas Scorecard, Paxton pointed to Texans for Lawsuit Reform as the driver of this new political playbook. He pointed to their failure to defeat him electorally in the 2022 Republican Primary.
“It was embarrassing to them, how much they spent, and the fact that they support somebody that got third place, almost last place, with a lot of money and a lot of their efforts,” he said. “But instead of making things good with me and trying to work things out in the future, they decided no, let’s work on this internal plot. Let’s do everything we can to take him out another way. The voters have spoken, but we don’t believe in what the voters have said.”
More:
https://texasscorecard.com/investigations/the-coup-how-texans-dodged-an-attempt-to-kill-their-power-in-2023/
