The morning after news broke that Texas House Democrats planned to return to the state, effectively ending their efforts to block Republicans from redrawing the state’s congressional maps , Attorney General Ken Paxton took a victory lap.

The firebrand conservative ally of President Donald Trump had used his office to wage several legal battles against the absent Democrats at once, drawing outsized attention as he challenges Sen. John Cornyn in next year’s Republican Senate primary.

Paxton asked the state Supreme Court to expel 13 of them from office. He asked an Illinois court to help enforce the Texas House speaker’s civil arrest warrants for the Democrats who had holed up outside Chicago. And he obtained a court order preventing former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke’s political ac

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