For the past month, two Texas political titans — the attorney general Ken Paxton and the former congressman Beto O’Rourke — have been locked in an escalating legal drama, complete with threats of jail time, courtroom showdowns and the possible bankrupting of a Texas voter registration effort.
The clashes have direct implications for the 2026 Senate race, given that Mr. Paxton is already a Republican candidate in the primary against Senator John Cornyn, and Mr. O’Rourke has been openly mulling a run as a Democrat. It has also served as an unusually direct example of how President Trump’s unapologetic use of government powers to pursue partisan ends has spread to political conflicts in the rest of the country.
More tangibly, the attorney general’s attacks threaten the future of Mr. O’Rourke’s political organization, Powered by People, which has spent nearly $400,000, about $100,000 a week, on litigation so far.
“He may very well be able to bankrupt the most successful voter registration program in the state,” Mr. O’Rourke said in a telephone interview. “This is weaponizing the political system to persecute your political enemies.”
It started last month as an offshoot of Mr. Trump’s push to have Republicans redraw congressional lines in Texas. Mr. Paxton directed his office to investigate Mr. O’Rourke’s political organization over its role in raising money for Democratic state lawmakers who had staged a walkout to stymie the redistricting push.
It quickly escalated to Mr. Paxton asking a Texas court to throw Mr. O’Rourke in jail. The legal wrangling has sprawled across the state to courtrooms in El Paso, Fort Worth and Austin.
“No matter how much Beto and Powered by People try and take us down in court, I will continue to wage legal war,” Mr. Paxton said in a news release last month.
Mr. Paxton was not made available for an interview, but his office provided a statement: “Beto’s desperate, unprecedented legal maneuvers will not stand, and there will be accountability for the Beto Buyoff of Texas politicians,” he said.
That was on top of at least 10 news releases his office has posted in four weeks related to the litigation with Mr. O’Rourke, not to mention the attorney general’s blustery social media posts.
Though Mr. O’Rourke has not yet declared whether he’s going to run for Senate, he insisted the Paxton legal attacks were political.
Mr. Paxton is “doing this because I’m a potential political opponent of his in the contest for the U.S. Senate seat in Texas,” he said.
The looming Senate race has become inextricable from the political contest that dominated Texas over the last month — the fight over redistricting.
Mr. Cornyn and Mr. Paxton, locked already in a struggle over the state’s conservative Republican primary electorate, competed for weeks to see who could respond most harshly to the walkout of Democratic state lawmakers early last month.
That contest quickly ensnared Mr. O’Rourke, whose spirited-but-failed runs for the Senate, the presidency and governor over the past decade have made him a focus of Democratic politics in the state. Three days after the Democrats left Texas, Mr. Paxton, representing the state, accused Powered by People and Mr. O’Rourke, a former El Paso congressman, of illegally fund-raising on behalf of the Democratic walkouts in order to delay a final vote on the aggressively gerrymandered map.
The attorney general asked his office to conduct an investigation, at the same time conceding that he did not have evidence of anything amiss.
“We’re going to find out if they’ve done anything inappropriate,” Mr. Paxton said in an interview on Newsmax. “Depending on what the answers are, we’ll find out whether we have something to investigate, and to prosecute.”
Mr. O’Rourke’s group, which is based in El Paso, did not provide the requested information to Mr. Paxton. Instead, it prepared to ask a court to block the request.
But before the group could file a legal case, Mr. Paxton filed his own lawsuit, in Fort Worth, about 600 miles from El Paso, accusing Mr. O’Rourke and his group of violating consumer protection laws by raising money to support Democrats who opposed redistricting.
Less than two hours later, Mr. O’Rourke filed legal arguments in El Paso, claiming that Mr. Paxton was abusing his office by directing it against a political opponent and asking the court to block the request for information from Powered by People.
In Fort Worth, a Tarrant County court quickly ruled in favor of Mr. Paxton and issued a restraining order against Mr. O’Rourke. The judge’s order barred the former congressman from raising or spending money for “non-political purposes,” such as out-of-state travel.
“The Beto Bribe buyouts that were bankrolling the runaway Democrats have been officially stopped,” Mr. Paxton proclaimed.
Mr. O’Rourke has countered that his advocacy on behalf of Democrats in Texas is protected political speech. His lawyers argued that Mr. Paxton’s use of consumer protection laws against a political organization or a political rival was beyond the scope of the law.
Powered by People said last month that it had donated more than $1 million to the Texas House Democratic Caucus, which led the walkout, as well as to the Texas Legislative Black Caucus and the Mexican American Legislative Caucus.
Despite the Tarrant County order, Mr. O’Rourke continued to hold events around Texas to raise money in support of the Democrats. So Mr. Paxton’s office went back to the Tarrant County judge, Megan Fahey, and asked to put Mr. O’Rourke behind bars for contempt of court, “unless and until he demonstrates a willingness to abide by the Court’s orders pending the outcome of this lawsuit.”
The court did not order him to jail but scheduled a hearing over whether to extend the temporary restraining order against Mr. O’Rourke and Powered by People.
While Mr. Paxton was winning Tarrant County, he was losing in El Paso, where a court issued its own temporary restraining order against Mr. Paxton, and ordered him to be deposed.
The dueling rulings raised the question of which court had the proper jurisdiction and which orders would carry the day.
Mr. O’Rourke’s lawyers appealed the Tarrant County rulings to the 15th Appeals Court, which began operating just last year and was created to handle cases involving statewide officials such as Mr. Paxton.
Republican lawmakers designed the court to move such cases out of the local courts in Austin, where judges are elected by the city’s liberal voters. All of its inaugural judges were appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, and would eventually be elected statewide.
Still, a panel of the appeals court ruled against Mr. Paxton, temporarily setting aside the Tarrant County hearing.
Mr. Paxton then asked the Texas Supreme Court to intervene. All nine members are Republican statewide office holders. They declined.
“What we are witnessing in Texas right now is a constitutional crisis being orchestrated by activist judges on the Beto-loving Fifteenth Court of Appeals,” the attorney general wrote on social media. “What’s worse is that the Texas Supreme Court just made a ruling refusing to stop the appeals court’s insane decision to help Beto.”
With Mr. Abbott’s signature on the redrawn map, the fight over redistricting has moved from Texas to states like California and Missouri.
But Mr. O’Rourke’s legal battles are not over.
“If I bribed somebody, you would think that I would be criminally charged with bribery, which I haven’t been,” Mr. O’Rourke said in the interview. “The point is not to win in the court, which he won’t,” he added: It is to create burdensome litigation and possibly bankrupt his organization.
“If we were to continue on this current trajectory, it’s very possible.” he said.
The appeals court has asked for arguments from Mr. Paxton by early next week in response to Mr. O’Rourke’s appeal.
J. David Goodman is the Houston bureau chief for The Times, reporting on Texas and Oklahoma.
The post In Texas, a Senate Race Turns Brutal Before It’s Even Declared appeared first on New York Times.
