3 min read
They’ve been voting in Texas for a while on Monday, where the Senate seat of John Cornyn was in immediate peril. Two rising Democratic stars, Representative Jasmine Crockett and Texas state legislator James Talarico, are colliding deep in the political cosmos, as rising Democratic stars are wont to do, damn them all. Is Beto O’Rourke due back from the Phantom Zone any time soon? How about young Joe Kennedy? Where have all the phenoms gone?
On the other side, Senator John Cornyn, who never has been the brightest bulb in the chandelier, finds himself in danger of losing the primary to Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, who manages to be a colossal crank and a colossal weasel at the same time. From Texas Monthly:
If you want to be in it for the long haul, then, cast away Christ’s instruction from the mount: Do hide your light under a bushel. No brightness of any kind has been detectable around our great state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, since he won office in 2014, which may be the reason he has held it for so long. Three full terms, despite the efforts of a large part of his own party to impeach him from office or remove him in his primaries for allegations including corruption, incompetence, and horndoggery, and the failed efforts of state and federal prosecutors to put him in jail. But his haters are finally notching one in the W column.
This is a guy who was so corrupt in his life and so terrible at his job that Representative Chip Roy found him impossible to work for. And Roy wasn’t the only one.
A few years later, other senior staffers with strong conservative credentials who had been handpicked by Paxton to serve him accused him of corruption and abuse of office, by repeatedly trying to help a real estate kingpin who was employing Paxton’s mistress from an FBI investigation. Paxton fired several of them, violating a clear-cut whistleblower protection law. He was then sued, and settled the case, seemingly so he wouldn’t have to testify, for $6.7 million in taxpayer money. The Texas House’s investigating committee felt Paxton had lied to them about the settlement. This was the basis for the 2023 impeachment. The Senate acquitted him after the presiding judge, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, took three million dollars in campaign donations from Paxton’s top backers. But, importantly, no one at the Legislature ever subsequently tried to determine whether the allegations made against Paxton were actually true.
Paxton’s remaining staffers were … choice.
And then there’s the more bizarre cases of dysfunction. Recently, one senior staff member was accused of sexually harassing another by fantasizing aloud about his anal rape by a cylindrical asteroid. (The alleged harasser was forced to resign but denied the incident, calling his superior at the agency a “petty tyrant.”) In another case, an employee who was the son of a major donor to Paxton’s legal-defense fund parted ways with the agency after he allegedly showed child pornography at an agency meeting, ostensibly to illustrate how evil child pornography is.
A cylindrical asteroid? Ouch. I’m glad that Star Trek movie was never green-lighted. And John Cornyn is in danger of losing to this guy? Being dim should not carry this steep a price. However, the general election was shaken last week when a poll showed that Crockett was leading in a hypothetical matchup against Paxton. This gave a severe case of the vapors to national Republicans. From the Hill:
As ballots started to come in this week, Cornyn issued a harsh warning for his party. “If Ken Paxton is the nominee, we could well experience a massacre and the first Democrat elected since 1994 in the state of Texas,” Cornyn told supporters in Fort Worth, Texas, as reported by NBC News. Republicans’ national Senate campaign arm made a similar case in a memo earlier this month, arguing Cornyn is “the only Republican candidate who reliably wins a general election matchup” and that Texas “cannot afford to be a gamble” in the high-stakes midterms.
I admit that I wish Talarico had waited another cycle before making this move. The problem with a state’s electing a human plague ship like Ken Paxton to be a senator is that there are only 100 of them, and what happens in the Senate affects all the rest of us in a more serious way. I hope Jasmine Crockett hits this race like a cylindrical asteroid.