31 May What’s Behind Paxton’s Impeachment?
The impeachment of Texas AG Ken Paxton is officially documented in 150+ pages of an investigative ‘report,’ the entirety of which involves allegations about actions and events that occurred prior to his most recent re-election.
There is a Texas statute that prohibits impeachment of a public official for conduct that precedes his or her election. Therefore, “The articles of impeachment are invalid and violate Texas law because they allege acts that occurred prior to November 2022, when Attorney General Paxton was last elected, in violation of Tex. Gov’t Code 665.081,” to quote Texas State Representative Carrie Isaacs.
The General Investigating Committee even admitted in its Memo to the House that “but for Paxton’s own request for a taxpayer-funded settlement over his wrongful conduct, Paxton would not be facing impeachment by the House.”
These facts alone render the entire impeachment effort unlawful.
This is not a technicality. The statute is very obviously intended to prevent a hostile legislative body from using impeachment to undo the will of Texas voters who, whether wisely or not, had just expressed their preference for who should hold an elective office such as Attorney General. The House Speaker and apparent Ringleader in Chief Dade Phelan, and every member of the House, knew or should have known that what they were intending to do was unlawful in Texas. The statute appears as though written precisely to prevent what this legislature did.
The core grounds for impeaching Paxton are therefore transparently deficient under the Texas statute–and Phelan and his lawyers know this–so why the defiant, do-it-anyway determination to impeach?
Many Texans perceive Paxton’s impeachment as an ambush sprung on the public at large on short notice at the end of the biennial legislative session, to cut off and cut short any effort of Paxton to defend himself in the court of public opinion. The largely secretive internal House investigation apparently began in March, but the public did not know about it until last week, just before the House voted. Maybe that can be dismissed as merely an example of Phelan and the impeachment supporters proving that ‘politics ain’t beanbag’, but it leaves a very bad taste in the mouth of Texas voters.
Impeachment proceedings can be launched at any time–there is no requirement that the legislature act only during the biennial session. So why the urgency at the last-minute close of the legislative session to press forward with a theory of impeachment that is barred on its face by Texas statute?
Well…many factors are lurking beneath the surface that bear watching. One is that Ken Paxton is often considered a strong future gubernatorial contender, whose grassroots appeal irks the establishment class. Paxton has also been prolific and brilliant in suing the federal government on a whole host of issues, from election integrity to big pharma vaccine liability and more, taking positions supported by the grassroots who elected him, but contrary to the views of some elected officials who do not wish the sunlight of truth to be shed on these and other topics.
Case in point: as Texas AG, Ken Paxton filed suit on behalf of the State of Texas against Big Pharma, alleging that one or more companies misled the public about the safety and efficacy of the covid vaccines. You can read about that lawsuit in this April 30, 2023 article in the New York Post.
Substack writers Dr. Naomi Wolf and Steve Kirsch, and Edward Dowd, author of ‘Cause Unknown: The Epidemic of Sudden Death in 2021 & 2022’, among others, have long been publishing data showing covid vaccine-related injuries and deaths to be at levels that far exceed what had historically been viewed as legal/regulatory limits for what could be considered ‘safe and effective.’ If the observations and comments of Wolf, Kirsch and Dowd are accurate, the stakes for Big Pharma in Paxton’s pending litigation are easily in the billions of dollars…maybe all the way up to being ‘existential’ for those companies.
One obvious potential scenario is that Big Pharma that makes big political donations would be mightily determined to bring about the exit of the AG who is pushing to expose and remedy the vaccine situation. This scenario is a matter of speculation at this point, but something more than dredged up, already “litigated” and dismissed past episodes appears to be driving this otherwise inexplicable impeachment of Paxton.
Next step in this impeachment process is the trial in the Texas Senate, where evidence and testimony etc. can be heard. This is a recipe for expanded deep dives into every aspect of Paxton’s public and private life by those determined to remove him, which conjures up the old Stalin era observation by Lavrentiy Beria, “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” Before unleashing that spectacle, perhaps the Texas State Senate should address the issue of whether an explicit Texas statute makes the entire impeachment unlawful and void from the beginning because entirely based on events that happened before the voters returned Ken Paxton to the AG’s office in the election of 2022.