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Ken Paxton got smacked down in federal court. Again.
In his 11 years as Texas attorney general, Paxton has launched hundreds of performative lawsuits and investigations. His targets included: Twitter (making Elon Musk mad); Media Matters for America (same); swing states (disenfranchising Texas Republicans by registering too many Democrats); Bexar County (same); Target (Pride T-shirts); the NCAA (trans athletes); the state bar (investigating his ethical misconduct); and the State Fair of Texas (banning guns after a shooting).
For the most part, it all came to nothing. Paxton got a couple news cycles boosting his image as a culture warrior, then wandered off to the next outrage.
As a crimefighting strategy, it’s worthless. But as a political strategy, it’s brilliant.
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Paxton was indicted for securities fraud just weeks after being sworn in as AG; he was impeached by the Texas House in 2023 for abusing his office, only to be acquitted by the Senate after key witnesses were pressured not to testify; and he’s currently under investigation by the Federal Election Commission, which flagged nearly $883,000 in apparently illegal donations to his own Senate campaign. And yet, he was popular enough to knock Sen. John Cornyn out in the primary by implying that the longtime Republican was some kind of RINO squish.
Paxton is perhaps the purest distillation of the modern Republican philosophy that the law is a tool, shame is for losers, and the only thing that matters is using the machinery of your office to hurt your enemies and dominate the news cycle. He also pioneered the use of Texas courts — both federal and state — to project power across state lines into blue states.
But this time, Paxton tried to use his office to kneecap his Democratic rival James Talarico. And now a judge in Massachusetts has shut him down in humiliating fashion, highlighting the difference between Texas law and “real” law as it’s practiced in the rest of the country.
Act crazy
Republicans have long hoped to cripple Democrats by taking out the fundraising platform ActBlue. The GOP analog WinRed racks up several times more complaints, and yet the Trump’s Justice Department is investigating ActBlue for supposedly failing to weed out foreign donors.
Paxton launched his own investigation of ActBlue in 2025, when Democratic legislators left the state to deny Republicans a quorum to pass gerrymandered maps. Paxton sued Beto O'Rourke's Powered by the People PAC in Tarrant County, where a Republican judge immediately