Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton
AUSTIN, Texas - Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has his sights on a U.S. Senate seat and he apparently thinks anti-vaccine MAHA moms and trial lawyers will get him there.
Neither group is historically associated with the Republican Party, but President Trump has scrambled everything in politics, including recruiting former plaintiffs lawyer and Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy to run the Health and Human Services Department.
Paxton has fallen right in line behind Trump, suing Covid vaccine manufacturer Pfizer, tech giants Google and Meta and most recently Tylenol maker Kenvue, the successor company to Johnson & Johnson’s consumer health care division. He’s also suing Johnson & Johnson.
The lawsuits allow Paxton to tell Texans he is “protecting our kids” while also providing tens of millions of dollars in fees to law firms that traditionally have supported Democratic candidates. It also aligns him with Trump as he tries to free himself from basically a tie in the polls and win the GOP nomination for Senate next year against incumbent John Cornyn.
“The closer to Trump the better in these primaries,” said Brandon J. Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston and host of the “Party Politics” podcast and TV show. “Every contender is waiting for Trump’s endorsement, so being closer to the MAHA movement helps.”
Paxton has served as Texas AG for a decade and has long used the office to sue companies and deliver large settlements to the state. After narrowly escaping impeachment in 2023, he has increasingly turned toward using high-priced outside attorneys to pursue litigation, sometimes in parallel with national mass-tort cases.
He tapped Keller Postman, a Chicago law firm, to sue Johnson & Johnson and its Kenvue consumer-products spinoff over claims Tylenol can cause autism in newborns even though Keller Postman had a similar case thrown out of court after a federal judge in New York found its scientific evidence lacking.
Keller Postman partner Zina Bash, a native Texan and former Paxton staff attorney, helped her firm win $93 million in fees representing the state in litigation against Meta. She contributed $100,000 to the Republican National Committee this year and $38,400 to other GOP causes in 2024.
In all, private lawyers working on contingency for Paxton’s office have taken in more than half-a-billion dollars in contingency fees, including from a $1.4 billion settlement of a biometric privacy suit against Facebook owner Meta last year.
Paxton says he “has relentlessly fought against Big Pharma’s destruction of America’s health and safety,” suing Pfizer over its claims the Covid-19 vaccine was “95% effective” when clinical trials showed otherwise. A federal judge dismissed the case under the PREP Act, which protected medical providers against lawsuits during the Covid pandemic, but Paxton has appealed the case before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
In a brief, he accuses Pfizer of lying “to gain and maintain market share for a vaccine that earned it tens of billions of dollars in profit,” and using its “unique access” at social-media companies like Twitter to silence critics.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce filed a brief opposing the appeal, saying “adopting Texas’s interpretation of (the PREP Act) would dramatically increase the risks for businesses asked to help the government respond to national health emergencies.”
Paxton has also announced he is investigating baby food manufacturers over claims they contain heavy metals, mirrored in mass-tort suits, and pursued toothpaste makers over alleged dangers of fluoride to children, echoing RFK Jr.
“I will use every tool available to protect our kids from dangerous levels of fluoride exposure and deceptive advertising,” Paxton said in a news release. The state settled with Colgate-Palmolive by getting the company to reduce the depiction of toothpaste on ads aimed at children to a “pea-sized” amount.
Texas voters have a decade of experience with Paxton suing big companies, Rottinghaus said, so it is unlikely to put many voters off. Appealing to the new Make America Healthy Again movement could be an effective weapon in the fight for the GOP nomination for Senate, he said.
“This is a base-priming maneuver that definitely will sit well with a sliver of primary voters Paxton is trying to court,” Rottinghaus said.
Sen. Cornyn “is widely perceived as being on the ropes,” and may lose more primary voters as U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt, a West Point graduate who boasts he was the first to endorse Trump for president, joins the race.
Cornyn has “been able to bring Paxton’s numbers down but he hasn’t been able to improve his own,” Rottinghaus said.
