There’s no end to these assholes.
A crook any way you look
Hours before the Texas House overwhelmingly voted to impeach Ken Paxton in May, a well-funded supporter of the attorney general issued a threat to his fellow Republicans.
A vote to impeach Paxton, Jonathan Stickland wrote on Twitter, “is a decision to have a primary.”
“Wait till you see my PAC budget,” he later added.
Stickland is the leader of Defend Texas Liberty, a political action committee that has donated millions of dollars to far-right candidates in the state. It is a key part of the constellation of political campaigns, institutions and dark-money groups that a trio of West Texas oil tycoons — Tim Dunn and brothers Farris and Dan Wilks — have pumped small fortunes into as part of a long-term crusade to push Texas to the extreme right.
And, until last month, no state politician had received more money from those groups than Paxton, who has in turn used his office to push ultraconservative priorities while declining to defend state agencies in numerous lawsuits filed by groups connected to Dunn and the Wilks brothers, including those seeking to undermine the state’s campaign finance laws.
Now, with the clock ticking toward Paxton’s September impeachment trial before the Texas Senate, Stickland and his far-right friends are fighting hard and spending big to protect their most important ally — and to stave off a major loss amid their ongoing fight for control of the Texas GOP.
It’s a long story and most of the people mentioned in it are terrible, so read on at your own risk. My hope for acrimony and division is well placed, but it remains to be seen whether that translates to any electoral advantage. As one of the terrible people in this story notes, as nasty and exhausting even to them all of the crap from the oligarchs is, it’s had the desired-to-them effect of making Texas a lot more right wing over the past 20+ years. And it will keep doing so until they start losing elections.