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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is ratcheting up his feud with fellow Republican and acting Texas Comptroller Kelly Hancock, calling for Gov. Greg Abbott to remove him from office.
"It's time for him to be fired," Paxton wrote of Hancock.
Hancock is just the latest GOP target for Paxton, who has clashed with Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson, campaigned against former Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, and was impeached by the GOP-dominated Texas House of Representatives in 2023 after members of his own staff accused him of corruption. The Republican-led Texas Senate eventually acquitted him, and he kept his job.
And of course, Paxton has more recently been attacking U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican Paxton is trying to beat in a May runoff election.
So why take on Hancock now? Paxton didn't take kindly to Hancock sending him a letter calling on him to shut down Houston Quran Academy, a private school in Houston that primarily serves Muslims students and has applied to be part of the state's new private school voucher program.
Hancock, who administers that $1 billion program, initially blocked Islamic private schools from participating. But a federal judge stepped in, issuing a temporary ruling that allows them to participate. Families and schools sued the state earlier this month, saying the months-long exclusion amounted to religious discrimination.
"The question is not whether these schools should be able to participate… it is why they were able to operate in Texas in the first place," Hancock wrote in the letter to Paxton that was first reported by the online news outlet Texas Bullpen.
Paxton responded on social media on Tuesday, reminding his followers that Hancock was in the Texas Senate in 2023 and was one of 14 members who voted to convict him during his impeachment trial.
"Kelly Hancock is a Never Trumper and an incompetent loser who's an embarrassment to the position of Chief Clerk that he holds," Paxton wrote on X.
While other elected officials might have issues with their fellow Republicans, Paxton has no fear getting very public about his disagreements when he thinks a Republican is being too moderate.
It all bears watching if Paxton wins a seat in the U.S. Senate. Republicans, if they retain the majority in the midterms, would likely have the thinnest of margins to pass legislation, requiring the GOP to stick together or find bipartisan agreements. In that regard, Paxton would lineup more with Republican senators like Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Tom Cotton of Arkansas who traditionally have among the least bipartisan records in Congress, according to The Lugar Center in Washington, D.C., which tracks how often members work with the opposite party on legislation.
 | Jeremy Wallace, Texas politics reporter |
Who's Up, Who's Down
A daily stock market-style report on key players in Texas politics.
Up: ICE agents.
While the partial government shutdown affecting the Department of Homeland Security lingers on, TSA agents in Texas are among those still not getting paychecks. Yet, ICE agents who have been assigned to Houston's airports to help with the same security check-in lines are still getting paid even though they are also part of DHS. Why? ICE agents are getting funding via President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful from last summer, while TSA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the U.S. Coast Guard have to go through the regular appropriations process.
Down: Donald Trump.
There are more signs of trouble in the mid-term elections coming from Trump's own backyard in Mar-a-Lago. Democrat Emily Gregory won a special election in a state legislative district that includes Trump's estate in Florida. The district was previously represented by Republican Mike Caruso, who won by 19 percentage points in 2024. The result is similar to what happened near Fort Worth in January, when Democrat Taylor Rehmet flipped a seat in a special election that had been held by Republicans since the 1980s.
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That was U.S. Senate hopeful James Talarico's response to a podcast released last week in which the host Joshua Haymes and Pastor Brooks Potteiger of Tennessee called Talarico a "demon," "a snake," and a "wolf" because of the way he talks about Christianity. "I pray that God kills him," Joshua Haymes told their listeners. During the 20-minute episode, the two took issue with Talarico talking about being a Christian and why it fit with his Democratic views. Talarico is studying to become a Presbyterian minister.
What else I'm reading
The state quietly shuttered a jail booking facility in Val Verde County last summer that had operated as a hub of Gov. Greg Abbott's Operation Lone Star border crackdown, state officials acknowledged Tuesday. The Texas Tribune reports that Texas officials had opened two such sites for the governor's border initiative, which surged Texas Department of Public Safety troopers and State Guard members to the more than 1,250 miles of border Texas shares with Mexico.
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