Speaking of Republicans, let’s look at the GOP dystopia:
Attorney General Ken Paxton is facing impeachment. Here’s how it works in Texas.
The Texas Legislature has never removed an attorney general. If the House votes for impeachment, the Senate will hold a trial.
Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has been at the center of several scandals, is facing possible impeachment. A Texas House committee voted Thursday to recommend action, clearing the way for the Texas House of Representatives to hold a hearing and decide whether to impeach the attorney general for three terms.
Paxton, the the state’s top lawyer and one of its most powerful and controversial Republicans, has been the subject of criminal investigations, legal battles and accusations of wrongdoing for years. But after seeking $3.3 million in public funds to end a lawsuit by former staffers who accused him of workplace retaliation, the Texas House General Investigative Committee began investigating. on charges of wrongdoing.
The vote to impeach takes place today, and it is by a simple majority of the House. The article explains the rest.
How fighting for conservative causes helped Ken Paxton survive legal troubles
As the Texas House is set to vote on his impeachment, Mr Paxton is counting on the political support he has amassed as a Republican legal firerand.
Now, facing his own political showdown in the Texas House of Representatives on Saturday as the House prepares to vote on his impeachment, Mr. Paxton has made the stakes clear to his Republican supporters.
At a press conference on Friday, he reminded them that he was “leading dozens of urgent challenges against Biden’s illegal policies” and said the “unlawful impeachment agenda” was playing into the longstanding goal of the Democrats to remove him from office. He then called on supporters to come to the State Capitol on Saturday “to come and peacefully raise their voices.”
Michel Hiltzik/Los Angeles time:
A glimpse into the dystopian abyss of President DeSantis’ America
Press interest has grown lately, with DeSantis’ political initiatives becoming more feverish as his announcement draws closer.
But the press has not begun to pay sufficient attention to the curious experiment launched by DeSantis, based on the assumption that it is possible to win a presidential nomination, let alone a presidential election, by appealing exclusively to a bloc of racists, anti-Semites, gun-crazed and other far-right night owls. An America run by DeSantis as he has portrayed himself so far would be dystopian hell.
Let the exam begin.
It would be appropriate to begin with a careful examination of DeSantis’ positions on the most important geopolitical issues of our time, if they could be detected.
Well, that’s disqualifying.
Mariano Alfero/Washington Post:
DeSantis says if elected president, he would consider pardoning Jan. 6 offenders
Hosts of conservative ‘The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show’ asked DeSantis if he thinks the Jan. 6 defendants ‘deserve to have their case considered by a Republican president,’ and if he would forgive the former president Donald Trump if he was “charged with federal offenses. DeSantis said on his first day in office he “would have people coming together and looking at all of these cases.”
“Now some of these cases, some people may have a technical violation of the law,” DeSantis said. “But if there are three other people who have done the same thing but just in a context, like [the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020] and they’re not being prosecuted at all, it’s an unequal application of justice, and so… we’ll use the power of grace.
There, it is disqualifying.
Ron DeSantis administration officials solicit campaign money from lobbyists
This practice raises ethical and legal questions about state employees who attempt to raise campaign funds from lobbyists who currently have cases before the governor.
NBC News reviewed text messages from four DeSantis administration officials, including those directly in the governor’s office and in senior positions at state agencies. They asked the recipient of the message to contribute to the governor’s campaign through a specific link that appeared to follow who gives as part of a “bundled” program.
“The bottom line is that the administration seems to be keeping tabs on who is donating and is doing so using state personnel,” said a longtime Florida lobbyist. “You are in a prisoner’s dilemma. They will stay in power. We all understand that.
NBC News is not naming the specific staffers who sent the text messages, as that could reveal the lobbyists who received the messages and shared them.
This is how DeSantis runs Florida. It’s as disqualifying as his January 6 comments.
This is all just a reminder that DeSantis is a very bad character, and in no way a “better” choice for America than Donald Trump.
After lengthy debate, CT Senate pushes state suffrage law forward
The Connecticut Senate introduced a landmark bill late Thursday to protect historically disenfranchised communities from discrimination at the ballot box, including key protections once considered a bastion of federal voting rights law before to be struck down by the United States Supreme Court.
Senate Bill 1226, dubbed Connecticut’s John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act – a nod to the late civil rights icon – passed 27 to 9 votes just before midnight, after hours of emotionally charged debate among lawmakers what the proposal would accomplish. The Senate’s approval of the full bill marked the first time it has emerged from either house since its initial introduction in 2021.
Even blue states have work to do.
jonathan martin/Policy :
Are GOP anti-Trump forces beginning to implode?
A mission control outage for DeSantis and a soft launch for Scott bode ill for those hoping to thwart the former president.
NORTH CHARLESTON, South Carolina — Will it be like the week the grand plan to deny Donald Trump’s nomination fell apart?
For months, top Republican lawmakers, donors and strategists eager to block Trump have described, in separate conversations with me, an endgame for the presidential primary.
When it becomes clear in early state and national polls who is consolidating support, the most influential figures with ties to the trailing candidates will stage some kind of political intervention and tell them it’s time to step down. and rally behind the strongest alternative to Trump.
Such a plot has always seemed a bit far-fetched to me, to begin with because politicians aren’t known for putting party before themselves. Yet the appetite of elite Republicans to overtake Trump was and is so immense that I thought there could at least be an effort to do the right thing.
Yet, as spring turns into summer, traditionally the time when presidential candidates wonder if they are gaining ground, this vision seems more whimsical than strategic.
We don’t win on merits alone. We win by working hard (see Wisconsin).
Lisa Rubin/Twitter:
Tonight, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office publicly released a list of discovery papers it has produced or will soon produce to Trump. These items include a number of taped conversations, including one between a witness and Trump. But something else interests me more.
In New York State, a defendant has the right to receive all grand jury testimony and all other witness statements provided to the appropriate prosecutor’s office. But here, the Manhattan district attorney’s office also attached this two-page book list.
For what? Because these books themselves may contain relevant witness statements. And it’s quite a collection.
These are political books, gossip books and other books of interest included in the discovery. Read the thread.
On another topic, here’s Cliff Schecter on freshman Dan Goldman and his approach to Congressional BS:
