Ken Paxton Is the Face of a Sea Change in the Republican Party

As some see it, the Texas Republican primary for U.S. Senate is a battle for the future of the party: Longtime incumbent John Cornyn represents the conservative establishment, while Attorney General Ken Paxton is a rising MAGA firebrand. After Tuesday’s election, that battle will continue, as neither candidate broke 50 percent, and therefore they will face each other in a runoff in May. While Cornyn is a staunch fossil fuel ally—no one would mistake him for an environmentalist—Paxton has gone a step further, pioneering an unorthodox attack on renewable energy that upends a long-standing conservative principle.

Paxton’s ascent is notable for a few reasons. Coverage of the race typically notes his impressive array of scandals and legal imbroglios, such as being indicted for securities fraud in 2015; being successfully sued by four of his own deputies in 2020 after he allegedly fired them for reporting him to the FBI for abusing his office to help a wealthy donor; dropping $2.3 million in campaign money on private lawyers to defend him in his impeachment trial; and being accused of infidelity by his wife, state Senator Angela Paxton, who filed for divorce shortly after the launch of his Senate campaign. Paxton has also made headlines for his hard-line positions as attorney general, such as declaring in 2022 that his office would consider gender-affirming health care for trans kids to be a form of “child abuse” and threatening multiple Texas hospitals with legal consequences if they were to provide a court-approved abortion to a Texas mother of two with elevated medical risks.

But it’s arguably in his environmental actions that Paxton most clearly exemplifies the growing battle over what the Republican Party stands for. And it’s not because of the industries his work has typically championed (coal) or demonized (renewable energy, particularly wind power). It’s because of the way he’s pursued his goals.

Paxton has been one of the foremost crusaders in recent years in the growing conservative war on ESG—short for “environmental, social, and governance” principles, which may be adopted by companies or used in investing decisions. In this camp’s view, ESG is part of a “woke agenda” to discriminate against fossil fuels.

In late 2024, Paxton and 10 other Republican state attorneys general sued three large asset managers—Vanguard, Blackrock, and State Street—alleging a “conspiracy” to “artificially constrict the market for coal through anticompetitive trade practices.” As TNR’s Kate Aronoff noted at the time, this was a striking argument, given that coal use was declining for purely economic reasons and “the three financial firms Paxton is suing, moreover, have never given the impression of being all that committed to environmental goals.”

But the suit also indicated a move away from the Republican Party’s typical championing of free-market ideology. “Traditionally the conservative legal movement has been very in favor of investor choice,” said Yale law professor Joshua Macey. The “typical” conservative position on ESG investing might be to say that if corporate and personal investors “don’t like Vanguard’s approach to ESG they can go to a different fund. But Paxton decided to work with the power of the state to be incredibly prescriptive about what mutual funds and index funds can do.”

Last week, Vanguard settled the suit for $29.5 million. BlackRock and State Street continue to fight it.

Vanguard’s settlement was more likely driven by political strategy than a belief that it would lose the case, two experts I spoke to said. The suit in general “did not make strong legal arguments,” said Macey, although he noted that the case raised an “intellectually interesting problem” that academics have previously identified about when investor ownership of publicly traded corporations could potentially start to raise antitrust concerns. “To my knowledge, there has never been evidence brought that would satisfy the Sherman or Clayton acts that this is occurring,” Macey said, “but it’s the one legal argument that was both interesting and would not have been dismissed out of hand.”

This lawsuit is one of a few ways that Texas and Paxton have helped lead the conservative fight against ESG investing and the energy transition more broadly. Danielle Fugere, president and chief counsel of As You Sow, a group focused on social and environmental change via shareholder advocacy, pointed to Senate Bill 13, the state’s 2021 law banning investment and contracts with financial institutions deemed to be “boycotting” various energy companies, i.e., fossil fuels. Paxton in 2023 announced that his office would be investigating 21 financial institutions to see whether they were boycotting fossil fuels—a remarkable declaration given that the banks listed included Bank of America, JP Morgan, and Wells Fargo, all of which consistently top the lists of fossil fuel financers. A federal judge ruled last month that S.B. 13 was unconstitutional.

To Fugere, the actions of Paxton and his allies here aren’t just anti-environmental but “anti-capitalist,” in that they go against investors’ financial incentives. “As an investor,” she said, “if you care about your client’s ability to make money on the market, you’re concerned about climate change. If you’re investing in automakers that are behind in electric vehicle technology, you have to ask the question, Is this company going to be in business for the long term if it’s missing out on new technology?”

Both Fugere and Macey noted that coal is hard to defend from a free-market standpoint. “In some ways,” Macey said, “Republicans could be celebrating the Texas electricity market, which has consistently driven down costs in what appears to be the most aggressive free-market approach, and also has the most installed renewable capacity of any market in the country.”

The conservative antipathy to renewable energy isn’t new, of course, but Macey noted that the explicit rejection of free-market ideology is. “Paxton signals a shift in not even the Republican Party or conservative legal movement’s views about environmental protection,” he said, “but how they understand regulation of the corporation and the corporate form—to a more highly prescriptive approach that limits shareholder discretion.” It’s “a 180-degree shift from what they have done for the previous thirty years.”

Paxton’s face-off with Cornyn, then, will be more than merely a conflict between a scandal-ridden hard-liner and a more traditional conservative. It’s also a contest about how far the Republican Party is willing to go, overturning decades of free-market conservatism in its crusade against renewable energy.

Stat of the Week
$43.6 billion

That’s the amount of tax money estimated to be spent on tax credits for carbon sequestration. The number figures prominently in a letter recently signed by over 125 environmental groups, calling for Congress to stop extending these tax credits given to oil and gas companies that capture carbon only to use it in “enhanced oil recovery.” Read South Dakota Searchlight’s coverage of the topic here.

What I’m Reading

Noem’s spending limits have frozen millions in disaster aid, Democratic report charges

Department of Homeland Security head Kristi Noem’s policy of requiring her personal approval for expenditures over $100,000 is holding up huge quantities of disaster aid, according to a new report from Senate Democrats. The Trump administration disputes the claim, but The Washington Post notes that the report, compiled with the help of whistleblowers, “corroborate[s]” accounts the Post has independently received from “numerous current and former Federal Emergency Management Agency officials” about the funding delays:

The report identifies what it says are “at least 1,034 FEMA contracts, grants, or disaster assistance awards” that have been delayed or remain pending, including for victims of July’s deadly flooding in Texas and the catastrophic Hurricane Helene, which hit swaths of the Southeast in the fall of 2024.… It identifies a range of programs it says were affected, including leasing of rental units for Hurricane Helene survivors; urban search and rescue in North Carolina; technical assistance task orders for multiple disasters in Florida; unemployment assistance for Texas, Oklahoma and Kentucky; housing inspections for storm-battered homes; and crisis counseling.

Read Brianna Sacks’s and Brady Dennis’s full report at The Washington Post.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.