PART ONE
Pay-to-Play is now Pay-and-Obey
Looking at the slate of major statewide Republican officeholders and nominees in Texas, it’s easy to think “same old, same old.”
Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick have held high office for decades. While Ken Paxton is distinguished by criminal acts and other profound corruption, it’s not new. He’s been crooked his entire career, having abused every office he’s ever held.
The other Republican major office nominees – Don Huffines for Comptroller, Mayes Middleton for AG, and Bo French for Railroad Commissioner – are all mean-spirited MAGAs. They are typical of Texas Republican nominees since 2016 when their party surrendered its Texas bona fides to wear the Trump-submissive Mar-A-Lago MAGA party brand.
Major Texas Republican Nominees are ALL Multi-millionaires
But there is something unusual – probably unique in Texas history – about this group of Republican nominees. ALL of them are multi-millionaires. There’s not a live-on-a-paycheck person among them.
After an extensive search, we were unable to find an election in modern Texas history when either party nominated ONLY multi-millionaires to serve in our state’s highest offices.
So Texas isn’t just divided by politics – it’s divided by wealth. And never has a party’s leaders been more financially separated from middle class Texans than Republicans right now.
Over the last 20 years, the gap between the ultra-wealthy and regular middle class Texans widened. Each of the Texas MAGA millionaire nominees is worth many millions of dollars. A person worth just one million dollars has over six times the wealth of a typical Texas household. So the costs for gas, groceries, housing, and healthcare that crush regular middle-class Texans are just details for MAGA multi-millionaires’ CPAs to handle.
Of course, being very rich doesn’t necessarily disqualify a state leader or make them suspect. You can even argue that personal wealth might make them less dependent on others’ money and less subject to outside influences.
Well, none of that applies to the Texas Republican multi-millionaire nominees.
They ALL Answer to Billionaires
The Texas MAGA multi-millionaires don’t just operate with arrogance and indifference to regular Texans, they’re politically hardwired to even richer multi-BILLIONAIRES.
It’s a corrupt political dependence and level of control that goes beyond crass Pay-to-Play lobby politics to a Pay-and-Obey system where billionaires call the shots dictating major policies and political actions that affect lives and livelihoods of ordinary Texans.
PART TWO
Texas Pay-and-Obey Roll Call
Special interests with deep pockets aren’t new to Texas politics. Throughout the last 25 years as Republicans have held complete control of the Texas government, there has been a Pay-to-Play mentality. Special interests able and willing to fund an army of lobbyists had an upper hand. But controversial issues were usually subject to at least some negotiated compromise. Broad public opinion mattered.
Now, individual billionaires dictate actions and policies to state leaders. They don’t lobby; they give orders. Instead of using their platforms and political skills to win over public support for the billionaires’ priorities, Abbott, Patrick, Paxton and other Republican leaders create diversions and stage distractions to keep Texans focused on everything but the billionaires who are exploiting them. It’s why a news cycle doesn’t pass without one or more high Texas Republican officeholder talking about sharia law, transgender athletes, “illegal” immigrants, or some other non-threat while never mentioning skyrocketing utilities, out of reach healthcare coverage, or even the cost of groceries.
Pay-and-Obey Roll Call:
- Greg Abbott became a multi-millionaire due to tragedy. Abbott received a huge structured settlement that has paid him over $9 million after a large tree limb fell on him and paralyzed him for life. Horrible. Of course, the experience didn’t result in him developing any empathy for others. Abbott has since helped adopt civil litigation laws that make it all but impossible for any other Texan to receive such a settlement.
For years, Governor Greg Abbott gave lip service but applied little real political muscle to the long-standing white nationalist goal of robbing Texas public schools’ coffers to pay for private school vouchers. That changed when Pennsylvania-based billionaire Jeff Yass contributed more than $6 million into Abbott’s campaign. Suddenly, private school vouchers were Abbott’s top priority, worth him weighing in on volatile Republican primaries and betraying long-time legislative allies to get vouchers adopted. In total, Abbott took in at least $12 million doing Yass’ bidding.
- Baltimore-born and raised Dan Patrick was a bankrupt sports bar owner in Houston. He somehow cobbled together financing from a shady investor to buy a failing AM radio station and then turned himself into a B-list, Rush Limbaugh-style radio personality. He later sold the station for millions. The skills Patrick picked up as an on-air right-wing grifter translated straight to extreme right politics. As a State Senator and as Lt Governor since 2013, the one certainty about Dan Patrick’s actions is that they will be in line with the wishes of Texas’ MAGA billionaires.
In 2023, Patrick showed no concern when the State House laid out a litany of improper, unethical, and illegal actions by career-criminal AG Ken Paxton and voted to impeach him. However, shortly after the House impeachment vote, Patrick accepted $3 million from the billionaire Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks-bankrolled MAGA outfit, Defend Texas Liberty. And that’s when he became engaged. Patrick made himself the presiding judge over the impeachment, though he has zero legal training or experience. He set up a process where all Senate deliberations were held out of the public eye, allowing him to pressure and coerce individual Senators. And throughout the trial, Patrick made a series of rulings favorable to Paxton – the most important allowing Paxton to avoid testifying himself. The billionaires paid for a rigged impeachment trial, and they got one.
- Attorney General Ken Paxton’s personal wealth is far harder to explain. Paxton entered the State House in 2003 as a run-of-the-mill local politician without a lot of resources. In the intervening years, he’s somehow parlayed his political positions into millions of dollars in personal wealth. Just this month, news accounts revealed Paxton owns 15 houses worth over $9 million.
Since announcing his candidacy for Texas Attorney General way back in 2013, Ken Paxton has been the special project of the MAGA billionaire network – especially Tim Dunn, Farris Wilks, and Kelcy Warren. No matter what sordid and sleazy scandals Paxton would create, they stuck with him and stood against anyone challenging him. Why? Ken Paxton has obediently taken legal and policy positions demanded by his billionaire backers, including expanding school vouchers, opposing corporate management or investing guidelines to protect workers, and challenging federal clean air or clean water regulations. - The Nepo-Babies: Mayes Middleton, Don Huffines, and Bo French all inherited their wealth. Other than elected offices, jobs or businesses they’ve held have been backed by family money. They are the definition of political Nepo-Babies.
- Mayes Middleton is a direct heir to the Middleton oil fortune. He’s used family money to bankroll each of his campaigns. He promotes himself as “MAGA Mayes” Middleton to signal his commitment to divisive culture wars, but he’s no MAGA populist. His direct ties and loyalties are to the billionaire elites.
- Don Huffines also inherited his money from a family fortune he had no hand in building. The elfin Huffines’ nomination is a redemption of sorts having lost re-election in 2018 after serving a single term in the State Senate. He self-financed to outflank other Republican candidates to win the nomination for Comptroller. He’s already vowed to shift the resources of the Comptroller’s office from assuring that state private contractors do their jobs at a fair price to imposing an Elon Musk DOGE like gutting of state offices crucial to serving the public.
- Bo French is such a vile and divisive character that it’s tempting to put him in a category of his own. He regularly spouts views consistent with White Replacement Theory and posts vile comments, fairly called hateful and racist. But, when you boil Bo down, he is a spoiled, dimwitted, born-on-third-base blowhard following the lead of billionaire benefactors. French is running for the Texas Railroad Commission, which is an important post regulating oil & gas interests. He’s bankrolled by the Dunn/Wilks MAGA consortium. Bo is their idiot, useful or not.
