GOP-controlled House impeaches AG Paxton

TEXAS

The voting board is lit with a majority of green lights as the Texas House votes to impeach state Attorney General Ken Paxton in the House Chamber at the Texas Capitol in Austin, Texas, on Saturday. ERIC GAY — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

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By Acacia Coronado, Jim Vertuno and Jake Bleiberg

The Associated Press

AUSTIN, Texas >> Texas’ Republican-led House of Representatives impeached state Attorney General Ken Paxton on Saturday on articles including bribery and abuse of public trust, a sudden, historic rebuke of a GOP official who rose to be a star of the conservative legal movement despite years of scandal and alleged crimes.

Impeachment triggers Paxton’s immediate suspension from office pending the outcome of a trial in the state Senate and empowers Republican Gov. Greg Abbott to appoint someone else as Texas’ top lawyer in the interim.

The 121-23 vote constitutes an abrupt downfall for one of the GOP’s most prominent legal combatants, who in 2020 asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn President Joe Biden’s electoral defeat of Donald Trump. It makes Paxton only the third sitting official in Texas’ nearly 200-year history to have been impeached.

Paxton, 60, decried the move moments after scores of his fellow partisans voted for impeachment, and his office pointed to internal reports that found no wrongdoing.

“The ugly spectacle in the Texas House today confirmed the outrageous impeachment plot against me was never meant to be fair or just,” Paxton said. “It was a politically motivated sham from the beginning.”

Paxton has been under FBI investigation for years over accusations that he used his office to help a donor and was separately indicted on securities fraud charges in 2015, though he has yet to stand trial. His party long had taken a muted stance on the allegations — but that changed this week as 60 of the House’s 85 Republicans, including Speaker Dade Phelan, voted to impeach.

“No one person should be above the law, least not the top law officer of the state of Texas,” Rep. David Spiller, a Republican member of the committee that investigated Paxton, said in opening statements. Another Republican committee member, Rep. Charlie Geren, said without elaborating that Paxton had called some lawmakers before the vote and threatened them with political “consequences.”

Paxton is automatically suspended from office pending the Senate trial. Final removal would require a two-thirds vote in the Senate, where Paxton’s wife’s, Angela, is a member.

Representatives of the governor, who lauded Paxton while swearing him in for a third term in January, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on a temporary replacement.

In one sense, Paxton’s political peril arrived with dizzying speed: The House committee’s investigation came to light Tuesday, and by Thursday lawmakers issued 20 articles of impeachment.