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MAGA’s top lawyer just gave a sitting GOP senator the biggest scare of his career

No lawyer has done more in the last decade to advance a distinctly MAGA approach to the Constitution than Ken Paxton.

Tuesday’s Senate Republican primary in Texas ended in an anticlimax, with no candidate winning a majority of the vote. Incumbent Sen. John Cornyn will face state Attorney General Ken Paxton in a May 26 runoff.

Though Cornyn will likely receive more votes than the other two Republican candidates — as of this writing, Cornyn has 43 percent of the vote, compared to Paxton’s 40 percent — Cornyn faces a tough road if he hopes to save his political career. Veteran senators (Cornyn was first elected in 2002) typically don’t face serious challengers within their own party. And the bottom line is that most Texas Republican voters just voted to make someone other than Cornyn their senator.

Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser.

Paxton’s strong performance, moreover, is a triumph for a far-right legal movement that seeks to reshape how the US Constitution is interpreted — one that rejects the liberal democratic theory of the Constitution that rose to prominence in the 1960s, and that approaches legal interpretation through a more partisan lens.

This includes challenging election results. As Texas AG, Paxton brought Texas v. Pennsylvania, a lawsuit seeking to block President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.

Beginning in the Obama administration, the Texas Attorney General’s office became a prolific source of federal lawsuits challenging Democratic policies, and this practice accelerated once Biden took office. Paxton claims that he sued the Biden administration 106 times as Texas’s top legal officer, filing the final lawsuit just hours before Biden left office.

To be sure, Paxton did not single-handedly build the Texas Attorney General’s office into the nation’s most important Republican law firm from the ground up. The office began asserting itself as a Republican Party litigation shop under Paxton’s predecessor, now-Gov. Greg Abbott, who, among other things, successfully sued the Obama administration to block a program that would have allowed millions of immigrants to work and remain in the United States.

But Paxton, who succeeded Abbott in 2015, took over the state AG’s office shortly before Donald Trump started transforming the Republican Party into a........

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