Ask a voter in a Waco diner what he thinks of politicians, and you will hear the same sentence you hear in Midland and McAllen. They are all crooks. He does not offer it as a theory. He offers it as weather. Most officeholders live inside that weather their whole careers, suspected in general, pinned to nothing in particular, and never forced to stand still long enough for the suspicion to be tested.
Ken Paxton is the exception, and not because he asked to be. In May 2023, the Texas House impeached him. In September, the Senate sat as a High Court of Impeachment for two weeks and tried him on 16 articles. The House Board of Managers had subpoena power, a press corps already writing the obituary, and a Republican establishment that wanted him gone. The State Auditor later put the public cost of preparing and conducting that trial at $5.1 million, with the total cost of the investigation estimated at $13 million. Every rumor that had followed Paxton for a decade was typed into an article and walked in front of a jury: the kitchen, Nate Paul, the outside lawyer, the alleged mistress, the charitable trust.
The Senate acquitted him on all 16. Not one article carried. Only 2 Republican senators voted to convict on any count. Tony Buzbee said the quiet part in closing. They thought he would quit. He did not quit. The Senate sent him back to work.
Someone will say an acquittal is only reasonable doubt, that juries let guilty men walk, that the most we can claim is the House failed to prove its case. In a normal criminal trial, that would be fair. This was not a normal defense. Paxton’s lawyers did not poke holes and sit down. They put documents on the screen and made the accusations smaller until they disappeared.
The bribery story was that Nate Paul paid to remodel Paxton’s kitchen. Drew Wicker, the aide who overheard a contractor say he would check with Nate, became the House’s human exhibit. On cross-examination, he admitted he was never in the room for any agreement and knew nothing about Paul paying for anything beyond lunch. Before-and-after photographs showed the same tile counters and the same cabinets. There was no granite. The remodel that had lived in the newspapers for months did not exist. Bank records showed Paxton wired about $121,000 of his own money to Cupertino Builders.
The moral center of the House case was the staff revolt of late 2020. Ryan Vassar was one of the deputies who walked into the FBI on September 30. Asked under oath whether they had reported the elected Attorney General for a crime without any evidence, he said they had no evidence. He later tried to dress it up as our experience. The Senate heard the first answer. A man who reports a crime is supposed to bring something with him. These men brought guesses.
The same week tells you what the revolt was for. On September 30, they went to the FBI. On October 1, they signed their letter and texted Paxton. On that same day, George P. Bush applied to reactivate a law license that had sat inactive for 10 years. Jeff Mateer was shown the bar record in the chamber and had to read the date. He resigned the next morning. Days earlier, the group had already retained Johnny Sutton, a former US Attorney from the Bush orbit, and Sutton worked the matter for nearly 3 years without collecting a fee from them. The General Land Office, then run by Bush, paid Sutton’s firm roughly $180,000 in taxpayer money in 2022. Bush then ran against Paxton. Paxton beat him 68% to 32%. Buzbee told the Senate there are no coincidences in Austin, and that the Bush era in Texas ends today.
David Maxwell was offered to the senators as a saint in a Ranger hat. He spent 24 years in the Texas Rangers and later ran law enforcement at the Attorney General’s office. Treat the halo as a costume. Maxwell came into the agency under Greg Abbott in 2010. Paxton named him Director of Law Enforcement in June 2015 on the advice of First Assistant Chip Roy. When the 2020 mutiny began, Roy was among the first prominent Republicans to tell Paxton to resign. The day Maxwell testified, Roy posted that he stood squarely alongside him. On the stand, Maxwell spent more than an hour asking Dan Cogdell to repeat questions, then admitted he had been pretending not to hear in order to throw Cogdell off. A Hall of Fame investigator staging a hearing problem is not a neutral cop. He is a man in a fight. In 2026, he endorsed Democrat James Talarico against Paxton for the US Senate and cut an ad calling Paxton corrupt. That is not new information. That is the same axe, still grinding.
Maxwell had already decided Nate Paul’s complaint about a tainted federal warrant was ludicrous. He would not investigate his old colleagues. Mark Penley would not investigate the feds. Paxton’s instruction to Brandon Cammack, the young Houston lawyer hired as outside counsel, was to seek the truth. Cammack testified that he found the referral persuasive, not baseless, and that if the allegations were true it would be a big deal. Staffers had tried to veto a contract only the Attorney General has statutory authority to sign. The House called Cammack a secret prosecutor. The young man on the stand described a junior lawyer who thought he was asking whether the government had cheated. And hanging over the whole trial was a fact the managers never answered. Nate Paul got nothing. No case died. No warrant was pulled. A bribe never paid and a favor never landed is a rumor with a filing fee.
The FBI and the Justice Department under President Biden had the same allegations for years, with grand juries and the power to flip witnesses, tools a state Senate does not have. That administration would have been delighted to indict a Republican Attorney General who had spent those years suing it. They charged nothing. Buzbee called the silence crickets. He said they did nothing because there was nothing to do.
Someone will raise the later civil settlement with the fired deputies. The Texas whistleblower statute pays employees who report their bosses, whether or not the report holds up. A judge’s reading of that statute is not a finding that Paxton committed the acts the Senate already rejected. On that basis, the Texas legislature declined to pay the so-called ‘whistleblowers’.
The diner voter is right to distrust politicians as a class. He has no test that reaches most of them. The man running against Paxton has never sat through two weeks of cross-examination on his official conduct, and neither have the House members who voted to impeach. Their reputations rest on the absence of a trial. That is the ordinary condition of political life. It is not a compliment.
Paxton’s voters know something those other voters do not. They know the worst his enemies could assemble with millions of dollars and subpoena power was a kitchen that was never remodeled and a deputy who took no evidence to the FBI. They know the Biden Justice Department looked and walked away. They can say, with more warrant than most electorates ever get, that whatever else Ken Paxton may be, he is not a crook. He is combative. He picks fights with Washington on purpose. Those are questions of taste. Corruption is a question of fact, and the people least inclined to clear him are the ones who cleared him.
They did not mean to give him that. The House managers told reporters the evidence was 10 times worse than the public knew; they leaked to the papers for months, they suspended an elected officer without pay before a single sworn witness had testified, and when the moment came to show the Senate what they had, they showed it a countertop that did not match the photograph and a Ranger who admitted he was playing deaf; that is the whole method in one breath, and it is why the thing collapsed. Overreach has a seperate cost they never priced. Had they left him under the ordinary cloud, the cloud would still be there. By throwing everything and landing nothing, they lifted it themselves.
Dade Phelan is the last piece. After Paxton told the Speaker he had embarrassed himself presiding over the House and should resign, the impeachment sped up. Buzbee said Phelan got his feelings hurt. That is a rotten reason to remove a statewide officer elected by 4.2 million people, and it is the reason that fits the calendar.
Conservatives keep treating the impeachment as a wound. It is the strongest page on the resume. Every other Senate candidate asks voters to trust a reputation that has never been tested. Paxton is asking them to read a record written by people who wanted him destroyed. On the rare occassion a politician is tried by his adversaries and cleared, the sensible response is not to apologize for the trial. It is to point at it.
The Senate wrote two words into its journal in September 2023. The Justice Department later added silence. Not guilty then. Not guilty now. Texas Republicans had already heard every syllable of this story and returned him to office over the man who wanted his job. Anyone who recycles the impeachment as a reason to keep Paxton out of the US Senate is not offering new evidence. He is asking the public to overturn a verdict already rendered twice.
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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.
Excellent summary of the absolute truth! Every Texan should read this.
Another masterpiece by Mr. Muse!
After this election Texas will have two highly accomplished firebrand lawyers representing them in the US Senate. It. Will. Be. Glorious.