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."