After the Dept. of Justice sued the State of Texas over its abortion ban on Thursday, Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton tried to attack U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland by saying his job is not to “worry about” Texas but to worry about “what’s going on in Afghanistan,” along with the southern border, energy prices, inflation, the economy, and “the world.”
The nation’s top law enforcement official has little to do with the now-ended war in Afghanistan, the U.S. economy, and even the southern border, not to mention the rest of the world.
“His job is not to worry about Texas,” Paxton told Steve Bannon, a former Trump senior White House advisor who now hosts a streaming far right wing talk show. “His job is to worry about, you know, the world, what’s going on in Afghanistan, what’s going on on the border, what’s going on with the United States economy, and energy prices, inflation. He doesn’t need to be regulating Texas laws.”
Attorneys General for decades have done exactly what Garland did Thursday: sue states for violating federal law or the U.S. Constitution.
But Paxton, who has been under indictment since 2015 for securities fraud, went even further down the false history road, claiming, “I’ve never seen a president or administration so interested in in regulating individual states and what they do this is a, is almost, I think it’s unheard of.”
That’s false, and Paxton only has to look as far as the Obama administration to see the federal government sue states for violating federal law. But perhaps even more importantly, Paxton’s predecessor, now Texas Governor Greg Abbott, infamously bragged when he was the state attorney general, “I go into the office, I sue the federal government and I go home.” Abbott sued the federal government more than two dozen times.
“None of it makes any sense,” Paxton added, which is also false.
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