Angela Paxton is not the likeliest figure to lead the movement against big spending by special interests in elections across the nation.
Paxton is a conservative state senator from Texas, whose estranged husband is benefiting from close to $200 million in unlimited, hard-to-trace spending in his Senate race. She even appeared in a super PAC ad last weekend asking Texans to “vote the ticket” and support Ken Paxton, despite what she considers his moral failings in their marriage.
But Angela Paxton came to Washington last week as part of a bipartisan delegation of state legislators preaching the gospel of barring big money in elections, particularly those undisclosed donations that might be coming from overseas or other nefarious interests.
This fall’s elections, particularly in her home state, are so overwhelmed by outside money that Paxton believes Americans are finally ready to pass a constitutional amendment that would overturn the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision that set the stage for today’s politics.
Trending
“We may be at a tipping point. I hope we are, because the fundamental issue is each state should be able to design [campaign laws] for itself. That’s how the system was built. The courts have moved us away from that, and this will restore it,” Paxton told The Washington Sun in an exclusive interview.
The group of state legislators is working with American Promise, a nonprofit that is leading an underdog effortto allow states and Congress to rewrite laws regarding how political campaigns are financed.
The plan is to take an outside-in approach to changing the Constitution that would demonstrate to Capitol Hill that three-fourths of states (38) stand ready and willing to approve what would be the 28th amendment to the nation’s founding charter. The leaders of this movement want to demonstrate to Washington that the support is out there if they have the courage to move on the issue.
The concept, laid out in barely two pages of legislative text, is either incredibly naive — considering it’s been more than 50 years since this polarized nation approved a new amendment — or perfectly simple in its appeal to conservatives, centrists and liberals alike.
“I think that as a nation, collectively, we’re tired right now. We’re exhausted,” Republican Utah state Rep. Jason Thompson, who’s facing an onslaught of direct mail financed by out-of-state liberals in his reelection bid, told The Sun in between meetings with Utah’s delegation in the Cannon Office Building.
“We the people are tired,” he said. “We’re tired of how Washington is spending money. We’re tired of how money is being used to influence our votes, and I think that’s what’s led to a huge increase in overall frustration by both parties.”
So far, American Promise has helped organize resolutions of support in 25 state legislatures, running the ideological gamut from Utah to Vermont.
Other states are moving in that direction as well, such as Texas, where Paxton is vice chair of the committee charged with writing election law and has already introduced a bill supporting the constitutional amendment. She expects to try to move quickly once the Legislature comes back into session in January, arguing that this is a states’ rights issue at the core of the conservative movement.
“The idea that Texas should decide for Texas, that’s all this is,” she told The Sun. “It’s not saying we should have this campaign finance law or this campaign finance law.”
She was particularly moved by a referendum in Maine to ban foreign money in campaigns that won overwhelming support, only to be overturned last week by federal courts following precedents set by the Supreme Court.
Her message to fellow conservatives receiving big support from outside money — such as Ken Paxton and other Texas Republicans — is that they will fare better.
“Even a candidate who’s getting a lot of money from a super PAC, if you put them on the spot and say, ‘Do you believe we should allow foreign money in our elections?’ No Republican is going to be able to stand on a policy like that,” she said.
Should the outside movement gather up 38 states ready to support the amendment, Rep. Tom Barrett (R-Michigan) has already written a bill to add it to the nation’s founding document.
“Free speech and competitive campaigns are essential to our democracy, but our elections should not be determined by elite megadonors,” Barrett said in introducing the measure.
But the issue hasn’t gained much traction inside Congress, as Barrett has just one co-sponsor: Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif).
And for more than 15 years, the Supreme Court has been increasing the ability of big money to influence campaigns, including this year’s decision, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, that weakened the separation between candidates for federal office and allied party campaign committees, allowing them to coordinate expenditures they hadn’t been able to discuss before.
Kavanaugh wrote that the “fullest and most urgent” application of the First Amendment applied to the “conduct of campaigns” for public office. “Spending money on one’s own speech must be permitted,” he wrote.
That’s a view that Republicans like Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky have been pushing for 25 to 30 years, helping to create a system of super PACs taking unlimited donations that have often spent more money than parties’ actual candidates.
Democrats, after denouncing such spending, have also engaged in this political arms race and have their fair share of super PAC allies who will spend hundreds of millions of dollars this fall, albeit nothing that can match the likes of Elon Musk, who spent more than $200 million in 2024 helping Trump.
Paxton, who isn’t up for election this year, spent a relaxing few days in Washington away from the airwaves of Texas, where it’s not just the Senate and governor’s races that are dominant. State senators there represent over 1 million people — more than a member of the U.S. House — and Paxton estimates that in her first campaign, in 2018, she spent $3.5 million.
Opposition to this flood of money has gained surprising resonance in some of the most rural, conservative states like Utah and Wyoming, where once-quaint state and local elections are turning into highly financed battles resembling the uglier races for Congress.
Republican Wyoming state Rep. Andrew Byron recalled that where a campaign for a “really competitive” seat representing about 9,500 people once cost about $5,000, that same seat now “can easily go into six figures.”
The weapon of choice in these low-population states has been direct-mail pieces, not the highly produced TV ads dominating national contests.
Candidates for state legislature used to produce a few pieces each election, mostly touting their own views and critiquing their opponent. Byron estimates 100 pieces of mail flooded his home ahead of the state’s unusually competitive primary elections this summer.
“I bet 80 of those or 90 of those don’t have any ties to any entity in Wyoming,” he told The Sun.
His travel companion to Washington last week, state Sen. Mike Gierau, one of two Democrats in Wyoming’s upper legislature, said these direct-mail pieces often aren’t even about local issues that the Legislature handles.
“The representative is driving illegals across the border, picking up fentanyl, and then, you know, dropping off that with the pornography at the local library,” Gierau said, mocking the extreme content. “It plays to these national hot-button issues.”
He works with Republicans out of necessity, and his argument for them to support the constitutional amendment comes down to how cheap elections are in Wyoming, relative to larger population states, and the damage that big money could do there.
“A group of people, a small group of people, can sit in their room and say, “I can turn the tide of an entire state election with less than $1 million. I can actually buy a legislature for that,” Gierau said.
In Utah, Thompson watched with horror when about $50,000 in dark money — he believes it was from liberals in the Jackson Hole region — poured into a local mayor’s race to impact the outcome. He is bracing to face up to $175,000 worth of outside super PAC money in his November election campaign.
“Which means I have to go then fundraise that much more money,” Thompson lamented.
These state lawmakers, especially the Republicans, believe that the first law they would pass, if they could, would be to mandate immediate public disclosure of big donations along with banning foreign contributions.
Paxton wants the key connection to be between candidates and voters, not candidates and donors.
“What we have is our candidates spend all their time raising money,” she said. “What we really want is them interacting with voters, so people can get to know them.”
Author
