Court benchslaps Ken Paxton's effort to take out ActBlue
Try that in a big city.
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Ken Paxton got smacked down in federal court. Again.
In his 11 years as Texas attorney general, Paxton has launched hundreds of performative lawsuits and investigations. His targets included: Twitter (making Elon Musk mad); Media Matters for America (same); swing states (disenfranchising Texas Republicans by registering too many Democrats); Bexar County (same); Target (Pride T-shirts); the NCAA (trans athletes); the state bar (investigating his ethical misconduct); and the State Fair of Texas (banning guns after a shooting).
For the most part, it all came to nothing. Paxton got a couple news cycles boosting his image as a culture warrior, then wandered off to the next outrage.
As a crimefighting strategy, it’s worthless. But as a political strategy, it’s brilliant.
Paxton was indicted for securities fraud just weeks after being sworn in as AG; he was impeached by the Texas House in 2023 for abusing his office, only to be acquitted by the Senate after key witnesses were pressured not to testify; and he’s currently under investigation by the Federal Election Commission, which flagged nearly $883,000 in apparently illegal donations to his own Senate campaign. And yet, he was popular enough to knock Sen. John Cornyn out in the primary by implying that the longtime Republican was some kind of RINO squish.
Paxton is perhaps the purest distillation of the modern Republican philosophy that the law is a tool, shame is for losers, and the only thing that matters is using the machinery of your office to hurt your enemies and dominate the news cycle. He also pioneered the use of Texas courts — both federal and state — to project power across state lines into blue states.
But this time, Paxton tried to use his office to kneecap his Democratic rival James Talarico. And now a judge in Massachusetts has shut him down in humiliating fashion, highlighting the difference between Texas law and “real” law as it’s practiced in the rest of the country.
Act crazy
Republicans have long hoped to cripple Democrats by taking out the fundraising platform ActBlue. The GOP analog WinRed racks up several times more complaints, and yet the Trump’s Justice Department is investigating ActBlue for supposedly failing to weed out foreign donors.
Paxton launched his own investigation of ActBlue in 2025, when Democratic legislators left the state to deny Republicans a quorum to pass gerrymandered maps. Paxton sued Beto O'Rourke's Powered by the People PAC in Tarrant County, where a Republican judge immediately barred the PAC from paying expenses for the Democratic lawmakers and ordered ActBlue to not move any donated money out of state.
The theory was that O’Rourke had violated Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act (DTPA), a consumer protection law, by deceiving donors about the intended use of their money. Within two weeks, the case had been reversed on appeal, and after vowing that he’d "stop at nothing," Paxton moved on to the next attention-seeking stunt.
But then on February 18 of this year, Talarico announced he had raised $2.5 million in a single day, $2.2 million of it through ActBlue. The very next day, investigators in Paxton’s shop bought a pile of VISA and Mastercard gift cards and started making $5 and $10 test donations on ActBlue (but not WinRed). Most of these donations were rejected, but in April, just as Talarico was due to file his next FEC fundraising report, Paxton turned up again in Tarrant County court with a lawsuit alleging that ActBlue violated the DTPA.
Paxton doesn’t do subtle. Within 48 hours, he appeared on three conservative podcasts to talk about the case. After explaining to Benny Johnson that “ActBlue has raised billions of dollars for liberal causes, liberal Democrats,” he boasted on The Charlie Kirk Show (no longer hosted by the late Charlie) that he intended to leverage the lawsuit to seize ActBlue’s donor records nationwide. Contrasting himself with Cornyn, who “has never been interested in this issue,” Paxton promised that “when in the US Senate, I’ll be all over this.”
Paxton’s campaign followed up with fundraising emails describing ActBlue as “the Democrats’ shadowy digital fundraising network.”
On May 1, ActBlue sued Paxton in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, alleging that the Texas state court action was an illegal retaliation against ActBlue and its donors for their protected expressive and associational activity in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
The case was assigned to Judge Richard Stearns, an 81-year-old Clinton appointee, who wasn’t about to consult rulings from a judge in Tarrant County. Luckily, he could look to judges in DC, where Paxton’s extra-territorial adventurism had already been road-tested.
In 2023, Paxton launched and investigation of the nonprofit site Media Matters for America after it published screenshots of corporate ads appearing alongside neo-Nazi content on X. Elon Musk went ballistic, promising to file a "thermonuclear lawsuit.” Stephen Miller responded that fraud is a civil and criminal violation and hinted that there are "numerous conservative state attorneys general." Paxton then opened a DTPA investigation into Media Matters on the theory that it had defrauded its donors by soliciting funds for journalism, then using the money for attacks on poor, defenseless Twitter.
Media Matters sued in DC to quash Paxton's subpoenas, and Judge Amit Mehta granted a preliminary injunction in April 2024, finding that Paxton's demand had "the effect of chilling Plaintiffs' expressive activities nationwide." Paxton appealed, and the DC Circuit affirmed, finding "uncontested evidence of Paxton's retaliatory motive."
Judge Stearns cited “Paxton’s well-known history of filing retaliatory lawsuits” — by which he meant the DC rulings — and the chest-thumping podcast appearances as evidence that the investigation of ActBlue was launched in bad faith as retaliation for ActBlue’s protected political activity. He also rubbished the claim that Texas’s lemon law could be used to apply to a platform that processes political donations.
“Paxton seeks to portray ActBlue’s platform as a product whose attributes have been misrepresented to consumers, but this framing does not withstand any close scrutiny,” he wrote. “The platform does nothing more than facilitate political donations from private donors, who seek out its convenience, anonymity, and aggregation of the benefit bestowed on chosen political candidates.”
Dangerous loser
Paxton’s trollsuits almost always detonate on impact with a real court. But that doesn’t make him harmless.
The donor-fraud theory — that a nonprofit or political organization has defrauded its supporters by soliciting money for one purpose and using it for another — didn’t die when Judge Mehta blocked the subpoenas, or when Judge Stearns called it out for the massive assault on the First Amendment that it is.
In fact, it’s the basis for the Justice Department’s indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which it accuses of taking donor money to dismantle hate groups while secretly funding them via a network of paid informants.
Forum-shopping has now become standard operating procedure for the DOJ as well. Just as Paxton parks cases in Tarrant County, where a friendly judge will sign off on patently illegal subpoenas of his political enemies, the Trump administration has begun parking politically harassing investigations in the federal courthouse in Fort Worth, where they’re virtually guaranteed to get in front of Judge Reed O’Connor. When the administration wanted to seize transgender children’s medical records from a hospital in Rhode Island, it went to O’Connor, a bare knuckles partisan who is perfectly willing to pretend he has nationwide jurisdiction.
In some sense, Paxton is a legal vanguard for the MAGA movement. Because he’s utterly shameless and willing to breach every legal and ethical rule, he effectively clears the way, normalizing prosecutorial abuses that other Republican lawyers would previously have balked at. The legal theories and practices that he road tests wind up in the Republican mainstream.
For all his buffoonery and courtroom losses, Paxton is genuinely dangerous for democracy and the rule of law. It’s up to Texas voters whether his reign of terror will come to an end, or whether he’ll get a chance to bring his particular brand of corruption to the Senate.
That’s it for today
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I’m not a doctor, and I don’t even play one on TV, but I have read a lot about some mental disorders that have given some clarity in understanding so many of the rethuglicans are burning our country to the ground.
I learned about the Dark Triad: narcissism (entitlement and grandiosity), Machiavellianism (strategic manipulation), and psychopathy (callousness and lack of empathy).
And, that’s not all. I learned about antisocial personality disorder, where people have no respect for others and do not follow socially acceptable behavior; borderline personality disorder, (this one’s a doozy, with lots to unpack, and I won’t try here); histrionic personality disorder, that includes unstable emotions and a distorted sense of self.
My perspective is that politics has turned into an adult day care program for rethuglicans (and some democrats, too). The same could be said of many corporate leaders, particularly of very large companies, but that’s another rabbit hole I’ll avoid.
The poison well in Texas runs very deep. It will be a Sisyphean task to get enough voters to use any critical thinking about electoral candidates values and priorities.