This is Bloomberg Law with June Brusso from Bloomberg Radio All Rise. The Court of Impeachment of the Texas Senate is now in session.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's eight year tenure as the state's top law enforcement officer has been marked by public scandals and criminal charges. The toughest test of his political resilience came when he was impeached by fellow Republicans in the House over allegations including bribery and corruption. Paxton denied any wrongdoing and said the impeachment was a political sham orchestrated by his opponents. And after a ten day trial.
For being fourteen ya's sixteen nays, a finding of acquittal is entered as to Article one, and that was the.
Vote on all sixteen charges, a resounding acquittal that puts back into office and attorney general, who's facing trial on felony securities fraud charges, remains under an FBI investigation and could be disbarred in ethics proceedings brought by the Texas State Bar Of course, Democrats and Republicans had strikingly different responses to Paxton's acquittal. Here's Democratic State Representative Anne Johnson
and Republican state Senator Bob Hall. The Republicans in the Texas Senate just returned him to the office of top cop. I will rely on what I said on the floor of the Texas Help House.
God help us.
When you talk about impeaching someone, destroying their life, taking them out of office. If they've done something and there's evidence for it, that needs to happen. What we don't need to have or sham investigations.
Joining me is Madlin Meckelberg Bloomberg Texas Legal reporter. Madeline start by telling us about the articles of impeachment broadly, what was he accused of so.
Ken Paxton was impeached by the Republican dominated House in May of this year on twenty charges that spanned the various allegations raised since he took office as Attorney General in twenty fifteen. They talked specifically about allegations raised by top staffers in the Attorney General's office who reported Paxton
to the FBI for alleged bribery. They all really center on Paxton's relationship with a friend and political donor named Nate Paul, who's a real estate developer in Austin and he's been accused of using his office to aid Paul, both in terms of turning over potentially confidential law enforcement investigation information to Paul, who was under an FBI probe at the time, and issuing opinions that would favor Paul
in some of his proceedings. And so there's twenty different articles that go into different facets, but this relationship is really what's at the heart of them.
And we should note that Nate Paul has been indicted on charges of making false statements to influence financial institutions over loan applications, and he's pleaded not guilty. Now, going back to the impeachment trial, can you give us some of the highlights of the evidence against Paxton? What stood out to you?
I think something that really stood out from these two weeks proceedings was consistent testimony from top employees in his office who said they told him time and time again that they were concerned about his actions. We heard from people who said that they had private conversations with him, who called meetings with him to tell him that they were concerned that what he was doing was stepping over
the line. Something that's really key in the case here that gets into this bribery allegation is his alleged extramarital affair. One of the accusations is that Nate Paul hired the woman with whom he was allegedly having an affair and kept her on his payroll, and in turn, Paxton was
performing these acts in his office to benefit Paul. We heard from his former chief of staff in the office who talked about how this relationship affected the staff and how these actions that Pat Paxton was taking had impact. And she talked about feeling that people were uncomfortable fielding phone calls from Paxton's wife and having to make certain accommodations for him and this relationship. I think that was a really compelling piece of testimony that we heard.
What was the defense to those allegations.
The defense called witnesses and they cross examined the prosecution's witnesses and went line by line trying to depute these claims. But I think the big picture from them is that this is a politically targeted attack at Ken Paxton. They say none of the actions he took violated the law. All of the things were things that he was allowed
to do within his power or as attorney general. One thing that was interesting during the proceedings in addition to allegedly hiring this woman who was part of the affair with Paxton, but the prosecutors claim that Paxton had renovations done at his home that were funded by Paul and that was another element of the bribery allegations, and his
defense were was really focused on that point. During the proceedings, they pulled up pictures of his kitchen that was allegedly renovated, and they confirmed that the countertops had actually not been changed out at this time, that supposedly the renovations were paid for, and they showed invoices of him making this payment.
That was a big victory, I think for the defense during the proceeding, but I think broadly speaking, they cast this as a political witch hunt against Paxton who did nothing well.
Paxton didn't testify, and he wasn't even there for most of the trial.
That's correct. He appeared on the first day to plead not guilty to all of the charges, and then he appeared briefly at the end of the proceedings, but he was not present in the chamber and the court decided that he did not have to testify. What's significant about his absence is that the person who was present and had to listen to all of these allegations was his wife,
who was a state senator herself, Angela Paston. She was not allowed to vote on any decisions during the trial, but she did have to be there during the court proceedings to listen to all of the testimony and evidence.
Did you find out what his strategy was of not even Deigny to appear.
Oh, we didn't learn much about how that fit into his broader strategy. But I think the goal for his defense was clear here, and that was to cast this as a mutiny by some staffers in his office who wanted to take over as attorney general. Potentially, that was something they brought forward. They said, this is all a political ploy. They tried to create this idea that there was some kind of happening about who should be leading the state's law office in this way. But we didn't
hear from Pakistan. We heard from people close to him in the office, and most of the witnesses for the prosecution were former employees who spoke to his conduct during
the period alleged. When the defense did call witnesses, they asked four current members of the Attorney General's office to testify, including one of the people that oversees the Open Records Division, and folks who could speak to what they said was Paxton's correct behavior while he was in office, But we didn't get to hear from him himself.
Tell us about the vote for a conviction. Twenty one senators, which represent two thirds of the chamber, would have had to vote for Paxton's conviction.
That's exactly right. And this chamber, just like the Texas House, is dominated by Republicans, so there were nineteen Republicans, which would mean that some Republicans would have to vote in favor of conviction in order to achieve a conviction at the end of this. But what happened. What we saw was consistently a party line vote, with all Democrats voting in favor of conviction on most of the articles and most of the Republicans voting in favor of acquittal on
all the articles. Only two Republicans in the Chamber ever voted to convict on a single article, and the process itself was a little bit confusing. Some of the witnesses talked about this experience of seeing rules both for criminal and civil proceedings being used in this trial, and so the vote at the end of the day there wasn't
one single vote. All of the members voted individually on each of the articles pending against him, and so we saw some variation, but at the end of the day it was a largely party line vote, with just two Republicans ever, voting to convict on two of the articles.
I understand that Trump surrogates and allies tried to pressure Republican senators not to impeach Paxson and posted names and phone numbers of potential impeachment swing voters.
Do you know what they were doing behind the scenes.
That's right, There was a really big pressure campaign around this entire proceeding. Obviously, Ken Paxton is a loyal ally of our former president who spoke on his behalf as himself. But then we did hear reports of these pressure campaigns that you're talking about. There were reports we saw of an effort to have online influencers pay people to post on behalf of the Attorney General advocating for him, and we certainly saw phone numbers being circulated, senators receiving phone calls.
But I think in addition to that campaign, I mean, this is the defining political site I think of this period in Texas politics. There's so much a play here. Ken Paxson's been under indictment since twenty fifteen, and so most of the allegations that we were talking about in this impeachment proceeding have been known publicly, have been known by the members for the duration of his tenure as
Attorney General, and it all culminated in this fight. So I think the political pressure has been mounting from the very beginning and really intensify it as a trial date group closer.
Coming up next, we'll talk about the other legal cases that Paxton is facing. You're listening to Bloomberg. I've been talking to Bloomberg Texas legal reporter Madlen Mecklberg about the acquittal of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton after a nine day impeachment trial.
So Paxton is.
Back in office as the state's top law enforcement officer, but he's facing other legal problems.
That's right, he's been reinstated as attorney General. I think there's a lot of eyes now on what happens next. How do you go back to that office after going through this like really public ordeal where a lot of details were shared about your alleged conduct. And then he's got other legal battles regarding his conduct that he still has to fight. Like I mentioned, he's been under indictment that's twenty fifteen or security fraud in a case that
is yet to go to trial. It's been delayed significantly by these different pre trial squabbles over venue and such. But I think we're going to get a date on a trial very soon in that case. And he's also tied up in some disciplinary proceedings involved in the state bar of Texas who accused him of professional misconduct for his efforts to try to overturn the twenty twenty presidential
election results. And there's an ongoing federal probe into his conduct that was prompted by the whistleblowers who are behind some of these impeachment claims, So we could still see charges them from that. So while this was a significant step, it's not the final word on Paxton's legal saga.
Those two state securities fraud charges, he was indicted on those just months after he took office in twenty fifteen, and it's always surprised me that that hasn't gone to trial yet. How has he managed to avoid trial for a year.
That's a great question. There's been quite a few skirmishes ahead of this trial date. I think a key one was venue where the case should be tried, either in Houston or in his home county of Colin County. There have been objections raised to the prosecutor bringing the case, and all of these disputes have gone through a full appeals process on their own, going up to the top state appeals court in Texas, and they caused significant delays. I think finally the state appeals court said that the
case can proceed in Harris County. There was a date here in state for Paxton in the case just before the impeachment proceedings began, and the judge said, once those proceedings wrap, she's ready to get this case moving again in Harris County.
And as you said, there is an investigation by the FBI and the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section. Is that on the same allegations that were to testified to in the impeachment trial.
That's right. So these top employees in Paxton's office, who we call the whistleblowers, they reported Paxton's conduct to the FBI. As it relates to advancing causes on behalf of his friend and political donor Nate Paul, and the FBI and the DOJ they've been investigating. We haven't seen the result of that investigation up to this point, but those cases are ongoing as far as we're aware.
And there's a civil suit by those whistleblowers against Paxton.
That's right. The whistleblowers stewed Paxton under the state's whistleblower statute, saying that they were retaliated against and in some cases terminated because they reported his behavior. And that case is actually what prompted this impeachment inquiry to start with, because Paxton and the whistleblowers had struck a three million dollar settlement agreement in the case, but in order to fund that settlement agreement, Packs then needed state lawmakers to allocate
money towards that effort. State lawmakers said they weren't prepared to allocate that money until they investigated the claims behind the lawsuit, which is what prompted the investigation that led to the drafting of the impeachment article.
Then he's also accused of professional misconduct by the state bar of Texas, and he could be disbarred in that proceeding.
That's correct, that's a civil proceeding that's happening right now.
Despite the impeachment, all the public scandals, the criminal charges he's still facing, some political experts think that he could reach prominence on the national political stage.
I think that's totally fair. I mean, from the beginning, Puxton's reputation has been built on being a conservative agitator who does the Biden administration over everything that they do, and he's worked to align himself with former President Donald Trump, who we saw goats through a similar thing during his presidency, being acquitted in impeachment cases and only serving to boost his reputation. And I think that that's exactly what we're going to see happen here with Paxton, who's going to
certainly be emboldened by this outcome. I think we're still waiting, kind of with bated breast to see what his first moves they're going to be now that he's been reinstated to the office. But I think it's certainly fair to say that this has only helped to bolster his reputation within his own party.
That's an appropriate comparison to Trump, and just to be clear he was re elected last year to a third term despite all these criminal and ethical allegations. Was it by a wide margin or a narrow margin?
That's exactly right, And that was a point that we heard from Paxton's defense council throughout the proceedings. They said, Texas voters knew about these allegations, and they didn't care. They elected him anyway, and so why should the state Senate overturn that? Why should they overturn the will of
the voters. I was elected by a large margin in the general election campaign, but actually last cycles primary was the first time we saw some very strong contenders who challenged him in the Republican primary, including George P. Bush, a descendant of the Bush political dynasty in Texas, and Congressman Louis Gohmer and former Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman challenged him. That primary went to a runoff, but
Paxton secured the nomination for his party there. But it was kind of the biggest political test of the impact of these allegations against him until we got to this impeachment proceeding.
Well, a lot more to come with Ken Paxton's legal troubles, and I know you'll be following them for us.
Madline, thanks so much.
That's Bloomberg Texas legal reporter Madlin Mecklberg coming up next on the Bloomberg Law Show. The ua W strike as automakers layoff more union workers, the question is whether the union's aggressive stance will work. You're listening to Bloomberg.
It's exciting, but very scary because the unknown. You don't know when you're going to get that full paycheck again. You don't know when you're going to get back in there to work again.
Tonia Sullivan is a third generation auto worker at Ford. She's one of the nearly thirteen thousand workers on strike against the Big three automakers, and as the strike enters its fifth day, GM and Stilantis laid off more than two thousand additional union workers. Marcel Edwards has worked for Ford for thirty five years and says, though there's some nervousness, the striking workers support each other. The nervousness about the strike right now, it's just the uncertainty.
But we believe in fame, We believe in this membership.
We believe in.
Our elected officials downtown to make sure that we come make with a contract that's respectable, and UAW president Sean Faine told workers in a video that he'll call on more members to walk away from the job if there's no major progress and talks by the end of the week.
We've been available twenty four to seven to bargain a deal that recognizes our members' sacrifices and contributions to these record profits. Still the Big three failed to get down the business.
My guest is labor law expert Michael Duff, a professor at the Saint Louis University School of Law. Last year, public approval for unions reached its highest level since Lyndon Johnson was president. Sixty seven percent of Americans approve of them. Have unions been making a lot of inroads?
Well, what I tend to focus on when having this conversation with my students is the number of private sexist employees unionized throughout the country. Right. So, a lot of time we get union activity, we get popular approval, which is better than popular disapproval from the perspective of unions. But then we turn around and we look at the total number of employees presented by a union, and we're stuck at a number in the low six percent, right, so six point one, six point three, six point four.
So my guarded answer is yes, I do think unions have been making inroads with respect to the attitude that the general public has to them, but so far that has not translated into people actually joining unions, So it's kind of a mixed picture.
UAW President Sean Fain. I want to talk about the way he's framed these negotiations as a broader struggle. He said, it's the battle of the working class against the rich, the haves versus the have nots, the billionaire class against everyone else.
What do you think of that framing?
So I come from a blue collar background in a prior to life, I was a blue collar worker in the airline industry for a number of years. I didn't go to law school until my thirties. I was a teamster shop steer for a number of years. And I would say that that rhetoric resonates with me as somebody from that class and somebody who has gone through on
a personal level labor structure. I think, you know, to be honest, we have to look at that and say, well, there's a generation of people, people of roughly my age or a little bit younger who would be very put off by that language that would seem extremely corrosive, not
tending to lead to agreements and so forth. Now we have younger people coming up through the ranks of organized labor, and the sort of precariousness that a lot of them are facing, I think makes the rhetoric almost suddenly appropriate, almost unbelievably to those of us who have been involved studying the labor movement for the last few decades. So what I think of it is that it matches I think the enormity of some of the structural changes that we see going on in the economy for workers.
What about this so called stand up strike targeting work stoppages at plants.
Well, I think to the outside observer, a lot of the sounds are pretty esoteric and strange, But actually from a legal perspective, it makes sense, right, because once you begin to learn a little bit about labor law, you find out pretty quickly that unions strike at their peril, and the reason they strike at their peril is that if employees are striking over economic subjects of bargaining, that's
the phrase of art. So you're not paying me enough, I need more contribution to healthcare from you, mister and his employer. If they are economic subjects that are sort of fomenting the conflict between the union and the player, employees go on and strike, they can be permanently replaced. And that's sort of the animating principle behind a lot
of what's going on here. What permanent replacement means is that you go out on strike over an economic subject, you can't be fired, but we have to be able to attract people to do the job that you're no longer doing because you're on strike, and we can't very well go to this prospective employee that we want to take your place and say, well, we're only going to temporarily hire you. Why because we're not going to get a lot of people that are going to like that deal.
So what we say is the replacement worker, the worker who's replacing the striking employee, is like, you come in and you can hold the job as long as you want, right, And so as a matter of law, the employer is not required to fire that person at the end of the strike. And so if you're the average worker, you go out on strike and you're permanently replaced, it's kind of a lawyer's distinction, the distinction between being fired from being permanently replaced. If it means no employment for a
couple of years, then you're out of work either way. Right, there's no money coming in and you don't have food
on the table. Once you understand that this is the background rule, you begin to understand why unions are very leary and have become more leary over the decades of just going out on strike, because if you go out on strike and the job is the kind of job that somebody coming in off the street could do, and then what's going to happen is the employer is simply going to replace all or most of the bargaining unit, and it's a very difficult situation for union. Now, lockouts
or another area of concern. Your blockouts further complicate the scenario because one of the things that employers have been able to do, and they've actually been able to do it is nineteen sixty five. A lot of people are not aware of that. In order to compel the union to agree to whatever the bargaining issue is, they can simply lock out members of the bargaining unit, say Okay, you're not coming back to work and so if what there are rules surrounding that, But it's what we know
of as a bargaining b lockout. You know, it's not viewed as discrimination. It is permitted under the.
Black What about these layoffs?
All three of the Detroit autel makers have laid off workers, and they say that it's because of internal supply chain issues, due to a lack of parts needed for certain assembly workers to do their jobs. So why are they citing that. Do they need a reason for laying off workers during a strike?
That's a very good question. So when you lay off workers because you don't have enough materials to continue production, arguably that's not even a lockout, right. You're not laying the workers off, at least on the surface. You're not laying them off to pressure the union to accept your bargaining position that you have. You're laying workers off because you can't continue production. In the old days, we used to talk about lockouts, and just give you a sense
of how far back this line law goes. It used to be that we would say that defensive lockouts were lawful, but offensive lockouts were unlawful. The distinction was a defensive lockouts you had a good business reason for doing what you were doing right, there was no way that you were doing it to pressure the union. You had a
business justification for locking employees out. I think the strategy of the automakers here is the position themselves in such a way that it's much harder to say that they're doing what they're doing for discriminatory reasons. So probably they're allowed to do it anyhow, They're probably allowed to do it to pressure the union to accept their bargaining position.
They arguably could do that, But here they actually have a business justification, which is, we can't make cars if we don't have park.
Do you consider a lockout and a layoff the same thing?
I do not. I think lockouts formally are workstoppages initiated by the employer, undertaken to pressure the union to accept the employer's position on a bargaining dispute, whereas layoff typically you're talking about the cessation of work that's prompted by various economic exigencies.
It sounds like management has all the cards. What cards does the union hold?
Well? The sort of gamesmanship, that's what it is. It's a high safe game. But this idea of the stand up strike is that by moving around, all right, So you know, a boxer doesn't stand in one place and allow himself to be punched. You sort of move around.
So you're not on strike at a number of facilities, but you are at one key facility, right, And so what you're doing is you're setting up a situation where the employer could permanently replace in that particular location or lock out, but then you have other facilities where nothing's going on. It's a variant of something that labor inside is called withsaw strikes because actually this actually goes back
a number of decades. Right. The idea is and typically it was a union bargaining with different employers than what was called a multi employer bargaining unit. But the idea is very similar that what you did was, as the employer, you see that the union is striking, an employer say over there, So what you do is you lock out your employees to prevent the union from being able to strike according to its own timetable. And the idea is
that that pressures the union in unforeseen ways. But what the union can do is to engage in work stoppages in unpredictable ways, it will run into various legal doctrines that have been designed over the decades to frustrate that kind of maneuver. But I do think that that's the union's best opportunity to wind up with a positive outcome here.
The union president has said that if there's not serious progress in negotiations by Friday, war workers are going to walk off the job. That's pretty aggressive, right.
Yeah, well, it is aggressive. And you know what this reminds me of. You know, at the end of World War Two, there was a period in history where aggressive union activity was obviously curtailed during the war, and there was a lot of hint up labor activity that all of a sudden was released at the conclusion of the war, and you had a lot of strikes occur, and that became the impetus for creation of the TAP Partly Act, which is a part of the National Labor Relations Act
as it's been amended. Right, And I almost feel like, you know, as a result of just everything that's been going on with respect to the gig economy and the precariousness of employment coupled with the pandemic and some of the labor conflicts that emerged because of the pandemic. A lot of it centered on healthcare and perceived dangerous workplaces.
All of that kind of culminates over this summer. You have a situation where workers maybe have had enough, they're willing to take risk, and I think Sean Fatis is tapping into that. He realizes almost viscerally that he has a rank and file employee group that's ready to hear that message. If that message had been attempted in other eras, it might not have been successful. But I think he is mirroring some of the emotions that are percolating up from the rank and file. And of course he is
a rank and file member. He has deep roots in the Auto union itself.
If you had to call it, how do you think this will end?
Well?
You know, the idea of labor law is that there is in the end compromise, and we have a very odd system in the United States where we're simultaneously bargaining in good faith, which has a very specific statutory meaning, even while there are strikes and lockouts and all kinds of things that look to the average outside observer like anything but bargaining and good faith. My guess is that
the union is going to make significant gains. And the reason I say that is because all of this is bubbling up in an era where you already have labor unrest. And so my sense is that the company, looking into its crystal ball out into the future, sees an environment that's likely to be favorable to labor, or at least the foreseeable future, and I don't think it would be a good marketing strategy to be seen as digging in now. Having said that, I'm not suggesting that I think the
union's going to get everything at once. That's why this is ultimately a negotiation. What I do think is that at the end of the day, there will be a negotiation.
Thanks Michael.
That's Professor Michael Dove of the Saint Louis University School of Law.
And that's it for this edition of The Bloomberg Law Show.
Remember you can always get the latest legal news on our Bloomberg Law Podcast. You can find them on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and at www dot Bloomberg dot com, slash podcast Slash Law, and remember to tune into The Bloomberg Law Show every weeknight at ten.
Pm Wall Street Time.
I'm June Grosso, and you're listening to Bloomberg