Government

TX Attorney General Ken Paxton Files Fake Election Suit, Gets Real Bar Complaint

Even karma is bigger in Texas.

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This is a mug shot. This fact is relevant.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has bigger problems than a bar complaint. Most notably, he’s under indictment for securities fraud and is facing a whistleblower allegations from his own staff that he took bribes and abused his office. And still, demands for your ouster from the legal profession by 31 eminent professionals, including four past presidents of the state bar, is never a good look.

The complaint centers around the preposterous election suit Paxton filed in December seeking to overturn the vote. Taking advantage of the Supreme Court’s original jurisdiction when one state sues another, Paxton sought to have the court invalidate the electoral votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, and Wisconsin based on facially spurious grounds. After eleventy-seven other garbage lawsuits washed out in state and lower federal courts, Donald Trump was convinced that Amy, Brett, and Neil would finally do him a solid. But, alas, the justices tossed the suit almost immediately for lack of standing. Womp womp.

The bar complaint alleges that Paxton violated the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct by filing a frivolous suit, making false statements of fact and law to a tribunal, engaging in deceitful conduct, and failing to uphold the Constitution.

The complainants point to Paxton’s representation that Biden’s odds of winning the election were less than one in a quadrillion, a gross distortion of a economist Charles Cicchetti’s assertion that this was the probability of Biden winning if the votes before and after 3am were randomly drawn from the population as a whole. Cicchetti’s analysis was ridiculous on its face even before Paxton mangled it — the differential between in-person votes favoring Trump and absentee ballots favoring Biden had been widely predicted. And furthermore, smaller rural areas, which tend to lean Republican, were always going to complete their counting before cities like Philadelphia and Atlanta.

As for misstatements of law, the complainants point to Paxton’s bizarre theory of standing which “flew in the face of the Electors Clause and the bedrock constitutional principle of each State’s sovereignty within our federal system.”

“The standing to sue Mr. Paxton sought from the Supreme Court had no basis in law and would have been a prescription for an autocratic President to perpetuate his power indefinitely against the will of the voters,” said Gershon (Gary) Ratner, co-founder of Lawyers Defending American Democracy and principal author of the complaint.

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The signatories were similarly unimpressed with Paxton’s creative stylings on the right of the Supreme Court to declare a state’s ballots invalid and turn the electoral votes over to the legislature to do with as they wished. And the use of his official position to voice support for the rally-turned-insurrection in DC on January 6 comes perilously close to subverting the constitution, they suggest.

By his conduct, Mr. Paxton was not honoring his sacred lawyer’s oath to support the Constitution: he was defiling it. By urging the marchers to fight against America’s critical constitutional process for the peaceful transfer of presidential power, Mr. Paxton was striking a dagger at the heart of American constitutional democracy.

For his sins, the complainants demand that Paxton be suspended from the practice of law, or even permanently disbarred.

So, will the Texas Bar make like New York and kick Paxton’s butt to the curb like a common Rudy Giuliani? Or will it stick its head in the sand like the DC bar, inventing a “no politics” rule to spare itself having to police Bill Barr?

Watch this space!

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Paxton Ethics Complaint

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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