(CN) – Protection for Dreamers, Obamacare, transgender rights – Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has led the GOP’s efforts to topple these cornerstones of Barack Obama’s legacy. But Paxton is in a dogfight with a Democrat who is using his pending criminal charges as the centerpiece of a campaign to unseat him.
Paxton has been uncharacteristically low-key in his re-election campaign against Justin Nelson, a Susman Godfrey partner, University of Texas constitutional law professor and founder of One Nation One Vote, a nonprofit advocating for U.S. presidents to be elected by popular vote.
Paxton has refused to debate Nelson even as the challenger airs TV ads showing Paxton’s smiling mug shot taken after he turned himself in to the Collin County Jail in suburban Dallas in August 2015, when he was booked on three felony charges and was quickly released after paying a $35,000 bond.
Nelson told Courthouse News that Paxton chose not to debate him to try to keep his criminal charges off Texans’ radar.
“He didn’t want to debate because this is his strategy. His strategy is not to engage with the public. His strategy is he does not want to talk about how he’s the first statewide official in Texas history to run for re-election while indicted, about how he’s charged with defrauding his friends and his clients and his fellow Republican lawmakers … and he doesn’t want to talk about how he’s been serving the special interests and not the public interest," Nelson said on the phone Friday morning.
The two securities fraud charges and one count of failing to register with the Texas securities board as an investment adviser, which carry a possible sentence of 99 years in prison, date to 2011 when Paxton was a member of the Texas House of Representatives.
He is accused of failing to tell investors in the tech firm Servergy, including Corsicana state lawmaker Byron Cook, that he would earn commissions on their money and of lying to them that he was investing in the company.
The case is paused as the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals decides whether a $199,000 bill three special prosecutors assigned to the case submitted for their pretrial work should be paid. Paxton’s supporters say the dragged-out process is proof the charges are bogus.
“Texas voters should question the legitimacy of a prosecution that has stretched on for more than three years,” Lucy Nash, communications director for Texans for Lawsuit Reform, said in a statement to Courthouse News.
Texans for Lawsuit Reform donated more than $700,000 in in-kind donations of advertising and polling to Paxton’s campaign in October.
The fact that a group dedicated to lawsuit reform is supporting Paxton might seem odd to his critics, who say he uses his office to advance the ideology of the Republican Party.
Paxton is leading coalitions of Republican attorneys general who have sued seeking declarations that two of Obama’s signature programs, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, and the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, are unconstitutional.
Nelson claims that by attacking Obamacare, Paxton aims to undo its most popular provision – blocking insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.
A recent Texas Tribune poll showed Paxton leading Nelson by 12 points, with 6 percent of respondents saying they’ll vote for a Libertarian candidate and 10 percent saying they’ll support someone else.