Patrick Thanks Burrows for Impeachment
Costs that Are Useless Now as a Weapon Capitol Inside
March 8, 2025
GOP Speaker Dustin Burrows found another way to butter up Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick this week when he furnished him with records that show that the Texas House poured more than $4.4 million almost two years ago into Attorney General Ken Paxton's impeachment that ended with his acquittal by Senate Republicans.
"That is 10 times more than what the Senate had to spend on the House’s failed impeachment of our attorney general," Patrick said Thursday night in a post on X. "What a total waste of taxpayer money!"
But Patrick, who served as judge in Paxton's trial in the Senate, pinned the blame for the costly ordeal exclusively on Republican Dade Phelan as the speaker when the House voted 121-23 to impeach the three-time elected state lawyer during the regular session's final weekend in 2023.
"As I suspected, former Speaker Phelan was hiding the millions of dollars he wasted on outside attorneys to avoid this issue from being brought up in his bid for re-election," Patrick contended in the tweet. "I want to thank Speaker @Burrows4TX for releasing the Texas House’s impeachment costs and for his commitment to transparency, unlike the former speaker."
Patrick said he'd been calling for an audit of the Paxton impeachment expenses for
"1 year, 5 months, and 16 days" before Burrows acquiesced when he delivered the documents complete with details to the Republican Senate president in two boxes. But Patrick raised the issue repeatedly before and after Phelan won a primary runoff election last spring after being targeted by former and future President Donald Trump, Paxton, the lieutenant governor and the entire right wing of the GOP in the Lone Star State.
The prevailing sentiment inside the Austin beltway had been that the price tag for Paxton's impeachment in the House would be considerably higher than the $4.4 million figure that Patrick is touting now. Regardless of the actual costs that the State Auditor's office is expected to determine in the analysis that Patrick accused Phelan of trying to sandbag, the information appears to be worthless now as a weapon for revenge against the former speaker and others who had significant involvement in the impeachment that 60 Republicans supported on the House floor.
Patrick didn't mention that Burrows voted to impeach the attorney general at a time when he was one of the two most powerful members of the House under Phelan. It might be naive to think that Burrows had no input on the process beyond a singular vote. The cover-up that Patrick alleged again in the social media post wasn't enough to save Phelan's speakership if the accusations had been true.
Phelan passed the torch to Burrows in December when he called off a re-election bid for the gavel as a consequence of the fallout from the AG's impeachment more than any other singular factor. Burrows expressed his gratitude to Phelan when he appointed him last month as the chairman of the Licensing & Administrative Procedures Committee.
The panel that Phelan is leading is ranked among the 10 most influential House committees in the Texas Legislature Power Rankings for 2025 that Capitol Inside published on Friday. All of the licensing committee's 14 members supported Burrows for speaker in the election on the floor January 14.
more to come ...
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