LETTER FROM AN AMERICAN
5.28.2023
TEAXS AG PAXTON
IMPEACHED, TEXAS WILL TRY
The Texas
House has voted to impeach Texas attorney general Ken Paxton on 20
counts of corruption and bribery, removing him from office temporarily
while the Senate prepares to try him.
Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) sided with Paxton, saying "No attorney general
has battled the abuses of the Biden admin more ferociously -- and more
effectively -- than has Paxton." Former president Trump also backed Paxton,
calling the Republican speaker of the Texas House "barely a Republican
at all," and threatened to target any Republican who voted for
impeachment.
During the hearing, Republican state representative Charlie Green said
that Paxton, too, had been calling representatives to warn them they
would suffer political consequences for voting to impeach.
Paxton is a Trump loyalist who after the 2020 presidential election sued
Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to try to stop the
counting of their electoral votes, charging that their elections saw
widespread fraud. The Supreme Court threw out the case, saying that
Texas did not have standing to sue, but not before it attracted the
support of 17 state attorneys general and at least 126 members of
Congress, including Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).
McCarthy is now speaker of the House and beholden to that extremist
right-wing. In the fight over raising the debt ceiling so the nation can
pay bills already incurred, the extremist Republicans have threatened to
default on the nation's bills in order to force the Democrats to defund
their signature measures.
Tonight, President Biden and McCarthy announced they have agreed to a
budget deal in principle, opening the way for the House to pass a
measure to raise the debt ceiling. Now the key question is: do they have
the votes to pass such a measure?
McCarthy continues to appeal to the extremists by attacking Biden,
saying inaccurately that the president "wasted time and refused to
negotiate for months" when, in fact, it was the Republicans who could
not agree on what to bring to the table until April 26. But this may
well not be enough; already Kyle Griffin of MSNBC reports that two
Republican sources have said that the far right is already balking at
the deal and is "plotting ways to gum up passage of the bill or add
amendments to make it more appealing to hardliners."