The Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, has asked a local judge to consider jailing Beto O’Rourke, saying the former congressman was openly defying a judicial order blocking him and his political group from fundraising and paying the costs of Democrats who left the state to stop Republicans from passing a new congressional map.
Tarrant county district judge Megan Fahey granted a request from Paxton last week halting O’Rourke and a group aligned with him, Powered by People, from fundraising. The order bars the group from using funds to pay the costs of Texas lawmakers during the special session or paying the $500 daily fines the lawmakers face for each time they are absent.
In his Tuesday, filing, Paxton said O’Rourke had continued to fundraise after Fahey’s ruling, pointing to a post on X soliciting donations on ActBlue, a Democratic fundraising platform, and requests to donate during a rally in Fort Worth last week.
Paxton requested O’Rourke be fined $500 for each instance in which he defied the court’s order and “be confined to jail unless and until he demonstrates a willingness to abide by the court’s orders pending the outcome of this lawsuit”.
Powered by People did not immediately return a request for comment.
In a filing in response to Paxton’s, O’Rourke’s lawyers said Paxton was “knowingly taking a statement entirely out of context to intentionally misrepresent the statement to this Court” and said they would seek sanctions against him, according to the Texas Tribune. The court’s order, they said, barred the group from fundraising for non-political purposes, not from fundraising altogether.
“He’s lying about me to try to silence us,” O’Rourke said in a post on X on Tuesday.
At the urging of Donald Trump, Republicans are seeking to pass a new map that would give them five additional seats in Congress. O’Rourke’s group has been one of the main funders for Texas Democrats as they have left the state for weeks to deny Republicans in the state legislature a quorum to conduct business. The Texas senate passed the new congressional map on Tuesday, but it will not earn full approval from the legislature because of the quorum-break. Lawmakers are set to adjourn on Friday and Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, has said he will immediately convene a new special session.
Many of the lawmakers are currently in Illinois, and Powered by People has been a leading funder in covering expenses, according to the Texas Tribune. Paxton and Abbott have been trying to ratchet up the pressure on them to return to Texas.
Paxton has also launched an investigation into Powered by People. O’Rourke filed his own lawsuit against Paxton in El Paso seeking to halt that investigation.
