On a Tuesday in July 2025, Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina told reporters that Ken Paxton is a “failure” and “doesn't deserve to be in the United States Senate.” He said Paxton would be an “anchor” on the Republican caucus. Tillis did not hedge. He did not say he had concerns. He named the man and named the verdict.
This is worth sitting with, because senators do not say this about members of their own side. The unwritten rule is: you vote against a colleague's nominee quietly, you express reservations privately, you manage the caucus from the inside. What you do not do is stand in a hallway and call a man a failure by name, on record, for publication.
What pushed Tillis past the rule is also on record. Ken Paxton was impeached by the Texas House of Representatives in May 2023 — the first Texas official impeached since 1917. He was charged on twenty counts, including bribery and abuse of office. The Texas Senate, controlled by Republicans, acquitted him in September of that year on all counts without calling a single witness. The vote was 23 to 9. None of the senators who voted to acquit were asked, under oath, to explain what they had read.
Donald Trump endorsed Paxton over John Cornyn in the Texas Republican Senate runoff. Cornyn has served in the Senate since 2002. He has been Majority Whip and Majority Leader. He is not a man who creates turbulence. He is, in the vocabulary of institutional Washington, a reliable vote and a steady hand — which is another way of saying the Senate works with him because he does not make it hard.
Tillis's point about the anchor is a practical one, not a moral one. A senator under the cloud Paxton carries cannot sit on the Judiciary Committee without generating a motion. Cannot stand for reauthorization of a federal agency without someone reading the impeachment articles into the record. Cannot do the ordinary invisible work of a freshman senator without the twenty counts following him into the room.
The Texas runoff will be decided by Republican primary voters, who in recent cycles have treated acquittal as exoneration and impeachment as persecution. Tillis cannot vote in that primary. He can only say what he said, which he did, on the record, with his name on it.
The Texas House impeachment resolution, filed May 27, 2023, runs to sixty-one pages.