Texas has a cautionary tale about what happens when you investigate a billionaire’s bank.
Rep. Dan Crenshaw signed a letter to AG Paxton about Colony Ridge loans, and the billionaire behind those loans spent the next cycle making sure Crenshaw wouldn’t be around to ask any more questions. The replacement congressman isn’t going to be investigating Woodforest National Bank’s lending practices anytime soon.
What you’re looking at is a party where loyalty flows exclusively upward and toward money, where actual accomplishments like legislation passed, service rendered, and elections won count for nothing against performative allegiance. A banker with $675,000 and a grudge has more power to determine representation than the American voters who already elected their representative.
Crenshaw outfundraised the nobody candidate named Steve Toth by $1.3 million and still lost 55-40, because the Marling money concentrated entirely on a super PAC running nonstop attack ads. Crenshaw’s fundraising couldn’t match huge negative air cover.
Crenshaw had been the GOP’s dream candidate in 2018, a Navy SEAL wounded in Afghanistan, telegenic, articulate, young, conservative by any historical measure. A Pete Davidson SNL moment turned him into a national figure overnight.
As a Navy SEAL, Crenshaw was awarded two Bronze Star Medals, one with “V” device, the Purple Heart, and the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal with valor. He medically retired from military service in 2016 with the rank of lieutenant commander.
He was supposed to be the future of the party.
Then he committed the unforgivable sin of being opposed to billionaire crimes. He acknowledged reality and rejected January 6 attacks, and he certified an election that was, by every legal and evidentiary standard, legitimate. And he supported the Afghan interpreters and soldiers who fought alongside him and his fellow SEALs, the people whose abandonment would be an actual betrayal of military honor.
For this he was reframed as weak, and accused by Toth of wanting to flood neighborhoods with Muslim immigrants.
Toth is a nobody who has accomplished literally nothing. He filed 79 bills in the Texas legislature last session. Only two made it out of committee. None passed. The man can’t shoot straight. But to a billionaire who hates Crenshaw, competence is the problem that needs to be replaced with incompetence.
When Defend Texas Liberty PAC leader Jonathan Stickland hosted the self-described Nazi Nick Fuentes — an open white supremacist who has praised Hitler and questioned the Holocaust — Toth outright refused to distance himself from the Nazi-promoting PAC.
He even said the usual quiet part out loud:
Every time Republicans panders and apologize to progressive Democrats on issues of race they show the world how little backbone they actually have.
Toth frames distancing from Nazism as pandering to progressive Democrats.
He is not even from Texas, he grew up in New York to be a pool cleaner and megachurch pastor. Then he became a politician in Texas and FOX commentator who couldn’t pass his own bills, was censured for attacking his fellow Republicans as too liberal, wouldn’t distance himself from a Nazi, tried to throw out legal votes, and whose primary skill seems to be performative outrage.
Since he first joined the Legislature in 2012, Toth … helped shift the Texas GOP to the right … through attention-grabbing spectacles and bitter in-fighting….
That’s a literal nobody, a rage clown, who has done nothing of merit, who the GOP wants replacing a combat-decorated Navy SEAL in Congress.
Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, who is about as far right wing as state leadership gets, officially called Toth a “fraud“.
Rep. Toth was caught on tape – in his own words – lying…. Rep. Toth has dug a deep hole for himself. It’s time for him to stop digging.
The Ted Cruz angle on pushing Crenshaw out using the mud-slinging liar Toth is particularly rich.
In 2021, Cruz began a phone call by thanking Crenshaw for defending him publicly after January 6, when Cruz was facing national backlash for fundraising off the riot. Crenshaw stuck his neck out for Cruz, and Cruz repaid it by endorsing his opponent — partly because of his financial relationship with Marling, partly because Cruz allies feared Crenshaw was preparing a primary bid against the senator.
So Cruz preemptively knifed him.