Better Call Ken
It was hardly the keynote slot—before Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle, before Eric and Lara Trump, before Rudy Giuliani calling for “trial by combat,” before John Eastman, dressed for some reason like Indiana Jones, and long before President Donald Trump, who would speak for more than an hour and incite an insurrection against Congress. But Ken Paxton didn’t mind being an afterthought when he took the stage at the “Save America” rally in Washington on the morning of January 6. The Republican attorney general of Texas was happy just to be there at all.
The 58-year-old Paxton wore a thick tartan scarf with a long black coat and no gloves, and his gray hair, stubbornly parted for decades, drifted haphazardly across his forehead in the stiff January wind. When he was 12, Paxton nearly lost his right eye in a freak accident during a game of hide-and-seek. It left permanent damage—it’s a different color from his left one, and the lid above it is half-closed. The effect is that whether he is posing for a mugshot or addressing a large group of people preparing to hang Mike Pence, Paxton’s face appears fixed in a mischievous half-smirk.
But as he stood on the podium that morning, Paxton had good reason to smile. One month earlier, beset by a damning series of allegations from his own staffers of personal and professional wrongdoing, Paxton’s career seemed to be free-falling. Then he found a parachute. Rejecting centuries of constitutional law and democratic traditions, Paxton filed a lawsuit arguing that Pennsylvania and three other states won by Joe Biden had harmed Texas by expanding mail- and early-voting access during the pandemic. He asked the Supreme Court to strip those states of their Biden electors and instruct their legislatures to replace them with new ones, effectively making Trump the victor of the 2020 election. Paxton’s gambit was one level removed, legally speaking, from one of those ransom notes they send in movies with all the letters cut out from magazine headlines. His brief miscalculated the number of electoral votes at play and, citing the calculations of one random man in Berkeley, falsely asserted that “the statistical improbability of Mr. Biden winning the popular vote in these four States collectively is 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000.” But that did not stop many of the GOP’s most prominent figures from endorsing it. A majority of the House Republican conference signed their names to an amicus brief. So did 17 other Republican state attorneys general. Trump truly believed it could work, and Sen. Ted Cruz promised to argue the case before the Supreme Court.
The justices unanimously rejected Paxton’s argument. Only two of them even believed he had standing to make it. In normal circumstances, such a defeat would have been a great embarrassment. But here in front of the White House, looking out on a sea of red hats and flak jackets, Paxton was taking a victory lap. With his wife, Angela, a Republican state senator, standing silently beside him, Paxton sped through his record in the frenzied cadence of a French cinematographer wrapping up at the Oscars. Texas had stayed red when states such as Georgia had flipped, he explained, because he had been willing to “fight” by filing lawsuits to restrict voting. “We kept fighting in Texas,” Paxton said. “We will not quit fighting,” he promised. His speech was over in three minutes. And then,
