Court right to tell Paxton to stay in his lane

Eager to be seen as a tough guy on election fraud, the AG wasted millions on fruitless hunt.

If, God forbid, our intrepid Texas attorney general stays in office beyond this fall, he’ll need to update his cultural references. Fulminating a few weeks ago about a Texas high court ruling that went against him, Ken Paxton warned his fellow Texans that the ruling was likely to unleash George Soros against them.

Soros, the Hungarian-born American billionaire investor and reliable supporter of liberal and progressive causes, has long been a handy bete noire for the far right, but the man is 91 years old. At some point — unless he really is “Satan’s seed,” as his enemies have labeled him — Soros will be as dated as bell-bottom jeans and beehive hairdos. No one will know who the man is, or was. Those late and unlamented fashion trends may come back; George Soros will not.

Paxton evoked Soros in response to a Dec. 15 Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruling that the attorney general cannot unilaterally prosecute election fraud cases. The all-Republican court ruled 8-1 that the AG can only get involved in a case when a district or county attorney requests his assistance. If he barges in uninvited, the court ruled, he’s violating the separation of powers clause in the Texas Constitution. The court got it right.

In response, Paxton took to Twitter, warning that “Soros-funded district attorneys will have sole power to decide whether election fraud has occurred in Texas.”

Last week Paxton urged the high court to reconsider. He didn’t mention that he had just wasted $2.2 million of taxpayers’ money on a fruitless hunt for election fraud. And he certainly didn’t admit that election fraud is about as common as a field of bluebonnets in January.

The court ruling was something of a surprise, but perhaps it shouldn’t have been. Once upon a time, traditional conservatives believed in local control, but that was before Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and our state’s indicted attorney general assumed total control, principle be damned. They will override local officials whenever they please.

That’s why Paxton ended up in court. As Donald Trump’s loyal lap dog, he hops down from his master’s expanse long enough to trot after alleged cases of voter fraud, desperately seeking to validate the former president’s outlandish claims. When the Jefferson County district attorney declined to prosecute newly elected sheriff Zena Stephens over campaignfinance allegations stemming from the 2016 election, Paxton rushed in to bring his own case. Except, knowing he was unlikely to get an indictment in Jefferson County, Paxton went shopping for a more favorable forum. He landed next door in Chambers County, a more conservative venue he assumed would be amenable to his allegations. In 2018, a grand jury accommodated the AG with an indictment on three counts.

Four years later, Sheriff Stephens is still in office, and the AG has had his hand slapped by the high court. “The attorney general, a member of the executive department, (may not engage in) the prosecution of election-law violations in district and inferior courts,” the court held. That power, it continued, is “more properly assigned to the judicial department.”

The Texas statute that Paxton had relied on for his over-zealous prosecution is unconstitutional, they concluded.

Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee welcomed the ruling. “This is a big win for local government and Texans who are tired of state officials exaggerating voter fraud claims to undermine elections,” he tweeted.

Of course, Trumpian-style exaggeration is Paxton’s specialty — that, and ruining people’s lives.

Consider Hervis Rogers, the 62-year-old Houston man who attracted national media attention when he waited six hours to vote during the 2020 Super Tuesday primaries. When he finally got to cast his ballot — the very last person in line to do so — he allegedly broke a Texas law forbidding people with felony convictions from voting until they’ve completed every part of their sentence. Rogers had a few weeks left on parole after serving nine years of a 25-year prison sentence for a 1995 burglary.

Rogers’ lawyers said he didn’t know he wasn’t allowed to vote until his parole was completed. Texas law at the time made it a crime to knowingly cast a fraudulent vote, but appellate courts had interpreted that to mean only that the voter knew of their status — in Rogers’ case, that he had not yet completed his parole — and not that they had to know it was illegal for them to vote.

The Legislature tried to address criticism over the harshness of that interpretation in September, when it updated the language of the voter fraud statute to make it a crime only when a voter knowingly “or intentionally” votes while ineligible.

Meanwhile, those legal niceties never matter to a tough guy like Paxton (unless they involve his own indictments for securities fraud). He went after Rogers like a hound on a hare.

“Hervis is a felon rightly barred from voting under TX law,” Paxton tweeted. “Rogers voted before his parole was scheduled to end, he was likely ineligible to cast a ballot on Election Day. I prosecute voter fraud everywhere we find it!”

The Rogers prosecution came a few years after Crystal Mason of Tarrant County was sentenced to five years for voting illegally. Her crime was casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 election — as she had been advised to do — while on federally supervised release. Her vote wasn’t counted. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has agreed to review her conviction, which also turned on the question of what was required to prove she knowingly voted illegally.

Mason is Black, as are Sheriff Stephens and Rogers.

With Rogers, as with the sheriff, Paxton had to find another venue to get the indictment he wanted. He chose Montgomery County. The fact that our fervidred neighbor to the north is predominantly white was, of course, coincidental. Paxton also pushed for bail to be set at $100,000.

Yessir, that man’s tough! The hapless fellow in his sights could have spent the rest of his life in prison. Fortunately, the high court’s ruling may come to the aid of “Hervis,” as Paxton called Rogers in his tweet.

Meanwhile, we have another problem to stew about. No, not George Soros, but Briscoe Cain, the Republican state representative from Deer Park.

The young man whose over-sized cowboy hat covers a brain bursting with legal acumen — as we learned when he stumbled through an embarrassing effort to shepherd the GOP’s voter-restriction package through the Legislature last session — has vowed to file a bill that would allow prosecutors to nose around in neighboring counties, hoping to catch the scent of election fraud and go after it.

“If the attorney general can’t, and a county won’t, then prosecutors from an adjacent county should be able to do it,” Cain tweeted.

Of course, those prosecutors might have better things to do in the jurisdictions they were elected to serve. Or, you never know, they might be addled by George Soros. Whoever he was.