The position of Attorney General of Texas, the second most populous state in the union, should idealistically be awarded towards someone who’s unashamedly in favor of law and order. A more Southern version of Jack McCoy from Law and Order, a true person of all aspects of the law. From violent crime to financial crimes, dirty politics and blatant nepotism mixed with incompetency. A true Attorney General should act with ethics and have a clear sense of what’s legally right and wrong, given that’s what I hope they studied in school.
And yet, Texas Attorney General and election conspiracy theorist Ken Paxton is arguably the furthest thing from a non-political arbiter of the fair law and order that supposedly exists in this country. A clearly biased lawyer and former JCPenney employee who’s provided a slew of incorrect and occasionally offensive comments, Paxton is equal parts Greg Abbott and Mike Lindell and has rallied against matters that others would consider to be civil rights. Matters such as Obama-era immigration reform, same-sex marriage and an honest state election process that didn’t have high-ranking state figures doubting the validity of it.
He sided with ExxonMobil in a lawsuit the oil giant filed to stop an investigation into their operations by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts yet objected to a Frisco high school allowing Muslim students to use an empty classroom to practice their daily prayers and even wrote a letter to the district’s superintendent about his “concerns”.
The perfect embodiment of the sleaziest of Texas politics that is slimier than a Nickelodeon program in the late 1990’s, Ken Paxton is the Attorney General that is anything but lawful. As is widely public news for the past half a decade, Ken Paxton was indicted in 2015 on two counts of securities fraud and one count of failing to register with state securities regulators. According to Reuters, Paxton sold shares of a technology company called Servergy, Inc. while not disclosing in any financial documents that the company was secretly giving him 100,000 shares in the transaction.
Learn how to become a medical cannabis patient in Texas
The case has become synonymous with Paxton’s reign as AG, with it looming over him despite his more wacky and attention-grabbing antics. Even when his office spent 22,000 labor hours in total looking for “widespread voter fraud” in the 2020 election yet only found 16 minor cases of voters’ addresses not matching up, this securities fraud indictment loomed over Paxton. In October 2020, Paxton was literally investigated by the FBI over allegations from seven different employees of bribery and corruption.
On the cannabis side, Paxton is apparently opposed to any cannabis reform despite fully knowing the long-term societal consequences of even a misdemeanor cannabis conviction. After decriminalization measures were introduced and/or enacted in the more liberal-leaning big cities in Texas in 2019, Paxton hopped on the feature in a letter from the Governor’s Office reminding those city officials that cannabis was still in fact illegal.
Nowhere on Ken Paxton’s website is any mention of supporting cannabis reform. While he takes up paragraphs bragging how Texas Right to Life awarded him the “Pro-Life All Star Award” and uses this as an opportunity to introduce his wife and children on the website, medical cannabis support isn’t mentioned once. As someone who’s an “honorable” award-winning pro-lifer, you’d expect Paxton to at least mention being open to the idea of legitimate medicinal cannabis usage for qualifying Texans, but any even half-handed mention is completely absent from his site.
Perhaps Mr. Paxton should hearken to the words of Ann Lee, founder of Republicans Against Marijuana Prohibition. In her interview with NowThis, Lee discussed her own ardently pro-life views but also how one can’t be supposedly pro-life but also against medical cannabis.
However, the horrible part of the tale of Texas’ latest clearly biased and corrupt Attorney General is that Paxton is far from the first man to hold this seat with clear legal issues and biases that run deep.
Any Texan upset with the currently almost unfunctional degree of state politics will be familiar with Paxton’s predecessor, as it’s none other than Greg Abbott. The current governor, overseeing Texas during two of its worst recent natural disasters and a pandemic in a controversial way, served for a total of 13 years as Texas Attorney General.
Referring to himself as “named Best Governor in the Nation” yet not providing a source, Abbott hasn’t been the biggest friend to cannabis in the state despite talking about creating jobs and economic opportunities across his websites. Although he’s the only man standing in the way of his power drunk lieutenant governor seizing power and turning Texas into his oppressive kingdom of bonkers beliefs, so we should at least be fortunate about that.
Abbott did mention his openness towards cannabis decriminalization during the 2018 gubernatorial debate, but has yet to enact any reform to this day. As for medical, Abbott did in fact sign the expansion to the Texas Compassionate Use Act to include PTSD victims, which is objectively beneficial for many cannabis patients in Texas who couldn’t qualify for TCUP prior. Still though, his number two is almost violently against any cannabis reform measures whatsoever who serial murders any cannabis bill in his radar.
The next predecessor shouldn’t be surprising to Texans tired of the political gridlock of the state and the bureaucrats who’ve held power for so long. John Cornyn, senator of Texas for over 20 years, only actually held the office of Attorney General for three short years. With such a short tenure, it’s hard to know how Cornyn compares to the other men who served as Texas AG, and yes it’s entirely men.
What’s shocking about John Cornyn however is the amount of dollars he’s taken from for-profit prisons and detention facilities, privately-owned prisons that are responsible for the continuing drug war and mass incarceration problems our country faces to this day.
In total, Cornyn has taken $86,000 and counting from for-profit prisons and has fiercely defended these facilities. He doubted the existence of systematic racism and bizarrely compared gay marriage to a man marrying a turtle in the draft of a 2004 speech. No, I can’t provide a journalistic explanation into what that means either. Not surprisingly, Cornyn also opposed the formation of a council investigating the January 6th, 2021 insurrection attempt at the Capitol.
Cornyn is opposed to the MORE Act because cannabis is somehow responsible for the opioid epidemic according to him. NORML has given Cornyn the lowest rankings in support of cannabis reform as a Senator. As Chairman of the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control, Cornyn has frequently discussed the complaints he has and the debated public health effects with the full legalization of cannabis with 88-year-old California senator Diane Feinstein.
Cornyn’s predecessor could arguably be the first Ken Paxton, or Ken Paxton before it was cool as the Gen Z’ers would say.
By that, I mean that he served as Texas Attorney General before being indicted and eventually sent to prison because he tried to give another lawyer a chunk of one of the largest court settlements in US history.
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A Harvard Law graduate, Dan Morales famously reached a $17 billion dollar settlement with large tobacco companies while serving as Attorney General under the Richards and W. Bush administrations during the 1990’s.
a novelty check of his historic settlement. (Houston Chronicle.)
Following a failed attempt at running for Governor in 2002, Morales was convicted in 2003 of fabricating information on paperwork in order for a fellow lawyer friend of his to receive a decent sum of the $17 billion settlement. And by sizable sum, I mean that now disbarred Houston lawyer Marc Murr could’ve received $560 million from this unsuccessful and super illegal deal with Morales.
Morales also pled guilty to one count of filing a false income tax return in 1998. Because of this clearly illegal deal, Morales was disbarred as a lawyer in 2003 and sent to serve four years in total at the Federal Correctional Institution in Texarkana.
While he’s now released, the fact that the indicted Ken Paxton’s predecessor actually served time in federal prison shows that the Attorney General of Texas isn’t immune from serving time in prison with the same people they likely prosecuted.
I’ve only gone back about four predecessors to the throne as well. Previous Attorneys General for Texas have done public wacky stunts such as making wildly false allusions that former Texas Governor Ann Richards was using cocaine and one even filmed a political campaign ad in which he gladly walked down a hallway of pictures of men executed during his administration.
Crazy people have run Texas for too long. As someone who moved away from Texas, I’m genuinely concerned for the future of the state if the state’s highest ranking legal office is run by someone who’s clearly a criminal.