Republicans spend $10 million reelecting the man now sued for a mother's death under his abortion law.

…(cont) The same week, a Washington Examiner column ran under the headline "The GOP's Texas-sized Ken Paxton dilemma," a conservative outlet's own assessment that establishment Republicans in Texas and Washington didn't want him nominated, and got him anyway. Restated as a ledger entry: the candidate the party didn't want is the candidate the party is now defending at eight figures. That isn't a contradiction. That's the balance due.

Whatever the eighteen hours covered, the record shows time going to a case with nothing to do with the Senate campaign. On September 12th, a surrogate named McKenna West filed an emergency application asking the Supreme Court to block a custody transfer, in a case that had already drawn — the filings don't say when — Paxton's intervention. The attorney general's office found room for a surrogate dispute. Where the abortion caseload sat on that same schedule is a separate question, and the schedule doesn't answer it.

Then, on September 16th, someone filed the number that actually reconciles. The family of Tierra Walker, a 37-year-old mother who died of preeclampsia at roughly twenty weeks pregnant in late 2024, sued Paxton over his enforcement of the law they say kept her from care until it was too late. Her death predates the ad buy. It predates the surrogate filing. It predates "lazy." It did not predate the $10 million; nothing on this page did.

Here is the whole ledger, hon: one filing asks a family to prove what a law cost them, in dollars a court can count. The other asks Republican donors to prove Paxton's opponent worse, in an amount already wired. Only one of those asks came with a check attached — and it wasn't hers.