If Ken Paxton wins Senate race in Texas, blame Trump’s pal Dan Patrick | Opinion

Dan Patrick wanted to win.

Ken Paxton is able to run for U.S. Senate for one reason: because Texas’ power-hungry lieutenant governor did not want Texas House Republicans to win a Capitol struggle and remove Paxton as state attorney general.

No lieutenant governor in Texas history has held the entire state in an iron grip like Patrick, the most dominating official in state government and also the most stubborn.

Three years ago, 60 Republicans in the Texas House voted to send Patrick and the Texas Senate 20 reasons to remove Paxton, an insolent and irresponsible state attorney general who used his office for personal gain and fired employees who turned him in.

On May 27, 2023, Paxton was impeached.

Three years to the day later, he woke up celebrating his nomination to run for U.S. Senate against Austin Democrat James Talarico.

State Rep. Ann Johnson, D-Houston, is a former child trafficking prosecutor from Houston who was vice chair of the House impeachment team accusing Paxton.

She did not hesitate when I asked whether anything kept prosecutors from successfully making their case.

“Oh, absolutely,” she said. “Dan Patrick.”

Instead of having a Texas Supreme Court justice preside over the trial, Patrick made himself judge.

His strong-arm tactics began with the trial rules.

The rules — invented totally out of thin air by a special committee under Patrick’s thumb — gave the lieutenant governor “near total control” and reduced the Senate to a “largely powerless and silent jury” under Patrick’s control, Austin Sen. Sarah Eckhardt objected right away in a complaint that turned out to be prescient.

Patrick, obviously annoyed that the House sent the Senate this hot potato, undermined the effort every step of the way.

For example, his committee wrote a rule that the accusations must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

That’s the standard for a criminal trial, not for deciding whether to fire a selfish executive.

“This is our third impeachment in Texas history, and if you go back and look at the other two, you know, [Patrick] made himself the ultimate judge on what could and couldn’t be heard,” Johnson said.

“So, when Paxton’s mistress walked in, he ensured she wouldn’t take the stand. When Paxton didn’t want to have to face taking the Fifth Amendment, [Patrick] made sure he wouldn’t have to take the stand.

“And so, Dan Patrick did exactly what he promised before the trial even started, and [he] promised and said, ‘This will be a political exercise.’ ... There was nothing judicial, nothing fair in the sense that you would expect in a courtroom.”

She is still “devastated” that Senate Republicans could not support their fellow House Republicans, she said.

“That that was a moment in time where you had a chance to clean up your corruption and restore the integrity of the institutions. They didn’t.”

An aside: The impeachment was separate from the criminal investment fraud case against Paxton.

In that case, he had already accepted a civil finding of guilt to a lesser charge and paid a $1,000 fine. He later paid a total of $271,000 in civil restitution and completed 100 hours of community service for a Collin County food bank.

By the time the Texas Senate convened for Paxton’s removal trial Sept. 5, 2023, Patrick had collected a very special $3 million campaign gift and loan.

A $1 million gift and $2 million loan came from the rural Tarrant County-based Defend Texas Liberty PAC, funded mostly by West Texas energy zillionaires Tim Dunn of Midland and Farris Wilks of Cisco.

“This is just the beginning, wait till you see the next report,” then-PAC chairman Jonathan Stickland of Willow Park wrote on the social platform Twitter, now X. “We will never stop.”

Patrick is not the only reason Paxton can run for the U.S. Senate.

Paxton had another powerful lobbyist on his side: then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.

When the House was voting on impeachment, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform: “The RINO Speaker of the House of Texas, Dade Phelan, who is barely a Republican at all and failed the test on voter integrity, wants to impeach one of the most hard working and effective Attorney Generals in the United States, Ken Paxton, who just won re-election with a large number of American Patriots strongly voting for him. ... I will fight you if it does.”

By the time the Senate convened in September to hear the impeachment case, Trump’s social media allies had organized a 24-hour bombardment of social posts, text messages and phone calls to senators.

When the Senate voted against removal — The margin in a private ballot was just two votes, one Republican state senator said — Trump celebrated victory.

“Yes, it is true that my intervention through TRUTH SOCIAL saved Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton from going down,” Trump wrote.

Did I mention that Patrick is state chair of the Trump campaign?

After the Senate voted to let Paxton stay, “judge” Patrick turned critic and condemned the House impeachment.

Patrick said the accusations were “rammed through” by House Republicans, calling the case weak and unsupported.

Phelan responded that Patrick was “confessing his bias.”

Johnson said the trial “changed Texas forever.”

“[We] continue to allow this corruption to fester at even grander levels,” she said.

Like the U.S. Senate.