05-25-2023, 11:38 PM
Texas Panel Recommends Impeachment of Attorney General Ken Paxton NYT
A Republican-led committee of the Texas House of Representatives recommended on Thursday that the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, be impeached for a range of abuses of his office that the committee’s investigators said may have been crimes.
The recommendation thrust the State Capitol and its Republican leadership into uncharted political territory in the waning days of the legislative session, setting the stage for the House to hold a vote on impeachment, its first in decades and one of the few ever conducted in the state’s history.
If he is impeached, Mr. Paxton, who has been under a separate criminal indictment since 2015, would be required to step down from his post temporarily while he faces trial in the State Senate.
“There’s really no precedent — we’ve really only had two impeachments under the constitution of 1876,” said Mark P. Jones, a professor of political science at Rice University. They include the governor in 1917, who resigned the day before the Senate convicted him, and a district judge who was convicted and removed in the 1970s.
Before the vote, the committee met in an executive session, outside public view.
“Overturning elections begins behind closed doors,” Mr. Paxton said in a post on Twitter that included video of a lawyer from his office arguing against impeachment to reporters in a nearly empty committee room, while the committee’s deliberations were underway.
The extraordinary developments were likely to test the Republican Party in Texas in new and unpredictable ways, at a time when divisions in the party have increasingly been exposed.
A Republican-led committee of the Texas House of Representatives recommended on Thursday that the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, be impeached for a range of abuses of his office that the committee’s investigators said may have been crimes.
The recommendation thrust the State Capitol and its Republican leadership into uncharted political territory in the waning days of the legislative session, setting the stage for the House to hold a vote on impeachment, its first in decades and one of the few ever conducted in the state’s history.
If he is impeached, Mr. Paxton, who has been under a separate criminal indictment since 2015, would be required to step down from his post temporarily while he faces trial in the State Senate.
“There’s really no precedent — we’ve really only had two impeachments under the constitution of 1876,” said Mark P. Jones, a professor of political science at Rice University. They include the governor in 1917, who resigned the day before the Senate convicted him, and a district judge who was convicted and removed in the 1970s.
Before the vote, the committee met in an executive session, outside public view.
“Overturning elections begins behind closed doors,” Mr. Paxton said in a post on Twitter that included video of a lawyer from his office arguing against impeachment to reporters in a nearly empty committee room, while the committee’s deliberations were underway.
The extraordinary developments were likely to test the Republican Party in Texas in new and unpredictable ways, at a time when divisions in the party have increasingly been exposed.
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