How Ken Paxton keeps pushing the legal envelope

CNN

13 hours ago

The morning after news broke that Texas House Democrats planned to return to the state, effectively ending their efforts to block Republicans from redrawing the state's congressional maps, Attorney General Ken Paxton took a victory lap.
The firebrand conservative ally of President Donald Trump had used his office to wage several legal battles against the absent Democrats at once, drawing outsized attention as he challenges Sen. John Cornyn in next year's Republican Senate primary.
Paxton asked the state Supreme Court to expel 13 of them from office. He asked an Illinois court to help enforce the Texas House speaker's civil arrest warrants for the Democrats who had holed up outside Chicago. And he obtained a court order preventing former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke's political action committee from raising money to assist those boycotting Democrats. Then, he claimed O'Rourke violated that court order and sought his arrest.
On Wednesday morning, Paxton said his strategy worked: Democrats planned to end their quorum-breaking effort faster than they had in previous standoffs, including 2003 and 2021.
'The idea of putting pressure on them from different angles — I think it got to them. Because they certainly came back faster than they have in the past,' Paxton told conservative talk radio host Mark Davis.
Paxton's actions, and his comments in the radio interview, offered a window into how one of the nation's most controversial attorneys general has long operated. He has pushed legal boundaries — riling up conservatives and using the courts to place himself at the center of political fights with national consequences, even when his lawsuits have little chance of success.
The three-term attorney general's willingness to wage those battles has earned him deep support among conservatives — including those in the state Senate who acquitted him two years ago, after the Republican-dominated House had impeached him over allegations of corruption and bribery.
It has also alienated many Democrats and some moderate Republicans — and it's why Democrats believe the state's Senate race could become competitive next fall if Paxton ousts Cornyn in the GOP primary. The swirl of controversy surrounding Paxton intensified last month, when his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, filed for divorce, alleging infidelity.
Still, as his primary against Cornyn looms, Paxton has effectively silenced his Republican critics as the party waged a pressure campaign to return the absent House Democrats to Texas. And he did so using tools unavailable to Cornyn — who asked US Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate the source of the Democrats' funding, but could not launch his own probe.
Paxton is 'one of the most innovative AGs in terms of using his office for advancing his political vision,' said Paul Nolette, a professor and the director of Marquette University's Les Aspin Center for Government who has written extensively about attorneys generals' use of their offices to influence national policy.
'What's new and unusual is that he's really been the one who has modeled how to use tools that don't, on their face, seem partisan, for greater partisan effect,' Nolette said.
Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said that among legal experts, 'I think everyone views Paxton the same way — as someone who will stop at nothing to use and abuse his office to advance whatever he views as the partisan political imperative of the moment.'
'He views himself less as the attorney general of Texas than as the attorney general of the Republican Party,' Vladeck said. 'And that may endear him to the folks who vote for him and who his actions benefit, but it certainly isn't consistent with his constitutional, statutory and ethical duties and obligations to all of the people of Texas.'
After 12 years in the Texas legislature, Paxton was elected attorney general in 2014. During his first two years in office — the last two years of Barack Obama's presidency — Paxton filed 27 lawsuits against the Obama administration.
He initiated a lawsuit seeking to have Obama's signature domestic achievement, the Affordable Care Act, declared unconstitutional — an effort the Supreme Court rejected.
Paxton was more successful battling Obama's immigration reforms, blocking the implementation of a policy that would have granted deferred action to undocumented immigrants who have lived in the United States since 2010 and have children who are American citizens or lawful permanent residents.
He also fought Obama's administration over environmental protections, water regulations, overtime policy, hiring rules for felons and more. He led 13 states that won an injunction halting the Obama administration's guidance for schools on transgender students' bathroom access.
Perhaps Paxton's most audacious legal move came in 2020, when he filed a post-election lawsuit against four presidential battleground states — Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — where President Joe Biden had defeated Trump. He alleged in a statement that those states' actions to expand voter access during the coronavirus pandemic had cast 'a dark shadow of doubt over the outcome of the entire election.' The Supreme Court quickly denied the lawsuit, ruling that Texas lacked standing.
During Biden's term, Paxton again regularly challenged the Democratic administration in court. His office bragged in a November 2024 news release that it had filed its 100th lawsuit against Biden's administration. Paxton said in a statement at the time that 'the federal government has been ruthlessly weaponized against the American people. But Texas stood in their way.'
He challenged Biden's immigration policies, including winning a ruling blocking Biden's 'parole in place' policy that gave legal status to certain undocumented individuals who are married to US citizens.
He unsuccessfully challenged the Biden administration's coronavirus vaccine mandate and later launched investigations into the pharmaceutical drug makers who manufactured vaccines.
With Trump back in office, Paxton has continued to wage cultural battles by targeting blue states.
In December, Paxton sued a New York doctor for prescribing abortion pills to a woman near Dallas — one of the first challenges to shield laws enacted by Democratic-controlled states to protect doctors in the wake of Roe v. Wade's overturning. Then, in July, he sued a New York county clerk for failing to levy a fine imposed in Texas when that doctor did not show up for court. The suits are ongoing.
He has also returned to an issue Trump raised constantly during the 2024 campaign: allegations of voter fraud. Paxton's office said in a news release last month it had 'launched a sweeping investigation into more than 100 potential noncitizens who cast over 200 ballots in the 2020 and 2022 election cycles.'
Nolette said Paxton has 'used the very ample tools of the AG's office to maximum effect.'
He pointed to Paxton's targeting of a migrant shelter in El Paso by demanding its client records, his use of consumer protection laws to probe pharmaceutical drug-makers, hospitals that provided gender-affirming care to minors and more.
'He's really been a leader in using those almost bread-and-butter tools of the office, which are typically for run-of-the-mill cases at the state level or noncontroversial, bipartisan issues, and using those in a more sharply partisan way,' Nolette said.