Ken Paxton's Impeachment Exposes a Patriarchy in Crisis

I’ve spent the last two days watching the live feed of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s impeachment trial in the state Senate. Which is to say, I’m going on 16 hours of listening to a rotating cast of old men who don’t understand modern microphone technology twang-hollerin’ at each other and periodically throwing little grown-ass man-tantrums. Mantrums, perhaps.

If it wasn’t already clear from the shenanigans preceeding Paxton’s trial, it became obvious about 30 minutes into this show that what we’re watching is little more than a dick-measuring contest for the men of the Texas GOP and their various hired cronies, all of whom would probably prefer to slap their ding-dongs on Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s desk and be done with it.

But we Texans are supposed to be taking this Lone Star embarrassment seriously. All the major news outlets, including the broadcasters, are live-blogging the proceedings. While public attendance at the actual trial in Austin seems thin, there are long lines for reporters to get a limited number of daily passes into the Senate chamber. This for the privilege of watching a parade of chucklefucks relitigate suspended AG Ken Paxton’s poorly mitigated dipshittery.

But this isn’t a trial about whether Ken Paxton took bribes from a coked-up hard-living real-estate scammer named Nate Paul. (Here’s Paul’s glowing Forbes profile from 2017, cryblood emoji.) It isn’t about whether Ken Paxton misused public funds or abused his power or even whether he humiliated his asshole wife, Texas Sen. Angela Paxton, in the process of securing favors for his mistress from the aforementioned scammer. It’s not really about the 16 articles of impeachment against Ken Paxton.

It is, almost literally, about answering the question: Who is the Texas GOP’s daddy? Is it Ken Paxton? Or is it a shadowy cabal of his ideological fellows, jealous and disloyal good ole’ boys who stopped being as good as they should have been, who have been conspiring for years to take him down?

The defendant in Ken Paxton’s trial isn’t the attorney general — it’s patriarchy. But the real bitch of it — forgive me — is that patriarchy is sitting at the prosecutor’s table, too. And at the judge’s bench. At issue is not whether Ken Paxton ever did anything wrong.

It’s whether anybody has the right to say “boo” to Daddy. But nobody can agree on who Daddy actually is. Republicans in the #txlege are split roughly in two: between a ride-or-die pro-Paxton faction — hyper-right-wingers who have hitched their wagon to our fraudster AG and will go down with the ship — and hyper-right-wingers who are vaguely gesturing at dipping water pails into the muck as the vessel fills up. It’s a brutal public battle between weenie-cronies vs. moderately-less-weenie-cronies.

In any other situation, these crass and craven fuckos would be in lockstep: nobody questions Big White Daddy! That’s how Texas Republicans — sometimes with the help of Texas Democrats — pass abortion bans and attacks on trans folks and get saw-wheels and razor wire installed in the Rio Grande. But now that there’s some disagreement over who actually gets to cosplay as Big White Daddy, they’re flailing to assert dominance. It’s been a real sad show so far.

We saw this most notably in the cartoonish bluster of Paxton attorney Tony Buzbee, a Houston defense lawyer (and city council candidate!) straight out of central casting whose saffron-radiation glow grew ever more pronounced every time whistleblower Jeff Mateer — himself a real shitbag piece of work — wouldn’t concede that, as deputy AG, he had altered official letterhead in the service of an anti-Paxton coup. Instead of disputing the facts of Paxton’s wrongdoing, Buzbee hammered at Mateer: How dare — how dare — Mateer question campaign donations and favors traded between Ken Paxton and Nate Paul? Didn’t he understand that the duly elected attorney general of Texas is the law itself? Wasn’t he thwarting the will of voters by daring to question Ken Paxton’s judgment?

But the other displays of hapless, upward-failing masculinity have been impossible to ignore. The legal eagles on stage at the circus this week are considered by many to be the tippy-top of the Texas law profession; if so, I fear our courts are in a dire state. Paxton counsel Don Cogdell’s opening statements sounded like nothing so much as a drunk-grandpa rant, complete with a nonsense aside about his ailing wife’s grudging approval of his work for Paxton. Leading the charge for the Texas House, which brought the articles of impeachment against Paxton, is Rusty Hardin, who himself seems to get lost in the most minute details — especially when technology is involved. (Hardin’s many and various legal victories include defending Enron accounting firm Arthur Andersen and making sure Anna Nicole Smith didn’t get a dime.) Star initial witness for the prosecution, former Deputy AG and current “chief legal officer” for a right-wing legal incubator Jeff Mateer, seemed so unfamiliar with trial proceedings that for the entirety of his testimony — which spanned more than six hours over two days — that he never managed not to talk over counsel, sidestep hearsay objections, or simply finish a thought without appearing flustered.

Now, I understand that most of this buffoonery is play-acting, or meant to be. And I’ve only covered a half-dozen or so trials in my career as a reporter. But I’ve never seen as much wholesale confusion on display as I’ve seen in the last 16 hours of this Paxton trial. The extent to which these men — the cream of the Texas legal crop — are fully bamboozled by how to conduct themselves without the strictures of a well-managed criminal court or established parliamentary procedure boggles my little lady mind.

And speaking of: ironically, the proceedings would be more of a mess if there wasn’t at least one woman stage-managing. Dan Patrick, the bar-owner/right-wing radio host-turned lieutenant governor, tasked with presiding over the Paxton proceedings as trial judge, blanched at every “objection!” until he realized he could just wave attorneys off with a “let’s move on.” He would have been entirely (instead of mostly) inept if he didn’t have Lana Myers, a Republican former court of appeals judge, stage-directing the proceedings in his ear.

And Ken Paxton himself is so above it all that he hasn’t even been required to appear at the proceedings beyond being present for his pleas. Texas Scorecard, a right-wing gossip blog on Team Anybody But Ken Paxton For Big White Daddy, reported on Wednesday that Paxton got a massage in lieu of attending the trial.

This is what you get when your state government is deeply mired in the mediocrity of white maleness. Daddy-wannabes fighting over turf with other Daddy-wannabes, at the expense — literally — of Texas taxpayers. Arguing not over morals or ethics or right or wrong or even the rule of law, but over which mediocre man’s wholly unearned authority is the biggest, swingingest, girthiest, unearned authority.

The dick show will resume in the morning.

Join Home with the Armadillo readers for live-chats of the Paxton impeachment trial — assuming the day-drinking doesn’t kill us in the process. We’ll be online every day that I’m able to keep an eye on the live feed, so check in!