AG Paxton once again makes Texas look silly with desperate lawsuit over Trump loss
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The saga of Ken Paxton: Our Opinion coverage
Our Editorial Board has closely followed the saga of Attorney General Ken Paxton. Read our coverage to catch up on the issues in his impeachment, and check out our analysis as the trial unfolds.
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For decades, Republicans have railed against frivolous lawsuits that clog the courts with specious claims, sometimes simply to grab attention or make a political point.
Now, in the increasingly ridiculous tenure of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, such suits are apparently part of the toolkit.
Paxton asked the U.S. Supreme Court in a petition filed Monday to effectively overturn the results of four other states’ presidential elections. He argues that officials in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin unlawfully changed voting laws because of the pandemic. He contends that Texas voters were harmed by the states’ alleged violations of equal-protection laws.
By Paxton’s strange accounting, states should be able to intervene in their counterparts’ election procedures. It’s a silly argument that the court should reject completely.
And it abruptly cuts against the very states’ rights arguments Texas has made for decades about election laws. If Paxton were to prevail, imagine the attorney general of California licking his chops at the chance to go after Texas’ voter ID requirements.
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Texas has no standing to sue over another state’s election laws, and any conservative who’s ever said one word about the importance of federalism should readily agree.
On the merits, too, Paxton’s claims are suspect. Executives in many states — including Texas’ own Gov. Greg Abbott — altered election procedures. Abbott, for instance, added extra days to early voting to ease congestion at the polls and hopefully prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
A vigorous argument over how far a state executive should be able to go in an emergency is appropriate. But that debate should take place in state legislatures, not in court with other states sticking their noses in.
If there was extraordinary fraud or malfeasance in state elections — and neither Paxton nor the campaign of President Donald Trump have demonstrated such — state or federal courts are perfectly capable of adjudicating it without Paxton’s help. They already are.
But Paxton asks the highest court to invalidate the four states’ slates of Electoral College voters and kick the issue to their legislatures to resolve. Such an extraordinary step on Texas’ behalf would be a dangerous precedent. Paxton, ostensibly a conservative, is opening the door to full federal control of elections.
The attorney general is also adding fuel to a dangerous fire. Too many Americans believe massive fraud swung the election to Democrat Joe Biden, and the president’s last loyalists are spinning desperate conspiracy theories about voting machines and foreign regimes.
Recounts have changed no outcomes. No inquiry or court has found any credible evidence of anything beyond the usual minor human error that voting and ballot-counting often suffer. If there was fraud, it was far too small to change the results.
Republican officials need to lead their voters out of this morass. Our democracy is resilient, but increasingly, feverish partisans cannot accept lost elections. When some Democrats embraced accusations that Facebook or Russia stole the election for Trump in 2016, Republicans were rightly outraged. Now, many are swallowing trumped up charges of a vast conspiracy.
Paxton’s lawsuit is a sad attempt by an embattled official facing corruption accusations to change the subject and generate political favor. The attorney general is reportedly under federal investigation after several of his top deputies raised questions about whether he took inappropriate action to help a campaign donor. He’s also awaiting trial on years-old state charges of securities fraud. The attorney general denies doing anything wrong.
It’s time for other Texas Republicans to call him out. Abbott, in particular, has the credibility to do so. After all, he held Paxton’s office before becoming governor, winning national attention for his legal challenges to the Obama administration.
He and others should push Paxton to resign. His attempts to hold on to his office were already harmful enough. Now, the attorney general is discrediting the state, misleading voters and feeding dangerous conspiracies. Enough is enough.
This story was originally published December 8, 2020 at 2:35 PM.
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