I don’t think even Molly Ivins could have found a way to make this funny.
Still a crook any way you look
For more than a year, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has owed the state over $11,000 in fines for filing late campaign finance reports. Now, his office is charged with collecting the money.
The situation presents a clear conflict of interest for enforcement of the state’s campaign finance laws, said Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, a government watchdog group.
“If I didn’t pay a parking ticket and incurred a fine as a penalty, most Texans would find it absurd if I also got to review my fine and have a role in deciding whether any action should be taken to collect that fine,” he said.
The Texas Ethics Commission can levy fines against candidates who miss the deadline to disclose their campaign donors. If they don’t pay, it’s up to the attorney general’s office to file suit to collect the money.
The ethics commission referred Paxton’s unpaid fines to the attorney general’s office in April, public records show. The office has not yet filed collections litigation against him and did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did his campaign.
The office, as of mid-June, has only filed one collections lawsuit this year against a state House candidate who owed more than $40,000, the fourth-highest delinquent fine in the state. Before that, the office had not filed any suits since September 2023.
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Campaign finance enforcement isn’t the only state process in which the Texas attorney general’s office is its own overseer. The office’s open records division has the ultimate say over what is exempt from disclosure under state law — including when the public records requests seek information about Paxton or his agency.
The office has said in previous interviews that it institutes a firewall within the agency to make sure that all requests are treated fairly. Gutierrez said that’s not enough.
“It just isn’t realistic to expect any state agency employee, who serves at the pleasure of the person elected to lead that agency, to be able to be truly independent in making judgment calls about their boss,” Gutierrez said. “There is no firewall that would make this process workable. We simply need a different process.”
Paxton’s just ahead of the curve as usual, correctly anticipating a world in which immunity for “official acts” that were once naively seen as “crimes” is baked into the system. The man is nothing if not in the right place at the right time.
As the story notes, Paxton’s co-insurrectionist First Assistant Attorney Brent Webster also owes a $1,000 fine for campaign finance violations from 2016. That has also been referred to the AG’s office, and I’m sure they’ll get right on it now that it’s in the papers. Other states have less stupid means of enforcing campaign finance laws, such as having an independent agency be responsible for enforcement, or just not letting campaign scofflaws file for election until they resolve the complaints against them.
The Lege of course could resolve this, but of course they won’t. The traditional reason for this was that they didn’t want to empower any potential future consequences against themselves. The modern reason is that after the impeachment fiasco last year followed by the GOP primary revenge tour, there’s absolutely no reason for any Republican legislator to try to do the right thing. It’s one thing to make a sacrifice for an accomplishment, and another thing to self-immolate. I’d have some sympathy if they weren’t all complicit in creating the conditions that led to this.
Some future government that is not like this one could deal with this problem when it gains power. Perhaps a future electorate will care enough about this sort of thing to make it a driver of their voting behavior. Perhaps the most expedient route to a solution at this point is to invent a time machine, go back to when these laws were first being passed, and convince those guys to do it better, given what we now know in the future. This would also work for quite a few other pressing issues of our time. Someone please get started on that.