AUSTIN, TX — Texas was sanctioned and its attorney general, Ken Paxton, reprimanded as deficient on Friday by a federal judge for ignoring court orders to hand over documents related to a lawsuit over the state’s voter registration practices, according to a published report.

The Austin American-Statesman reported that U.S. District Court Judge Orlando Garcia of San Antonio has complained the state’s months-long delays in providing the documents have wasted both time and money, disrupting the case, the newspaper reported.

Garcia singled out Paxton in his sanction, saying the state assigned only one attorney to the case. He didn’t buy Paxton’s excuse of being short-staffed either: “Defendants also claim that they had only one attorney assigned to the matter and their office lacked sufficient manpower to review and respond to the discovery requests,” Garcia wrote in an order signed Thursday. “This argument is common and understandable with solo practitioners, but not with the Office of the Attorney General for the State of Texas.”

Despite his protestations, Paxton did find managed to find time this wee to file an amicus brief on a case in which Texas isn’t even involved, filing the friend-of-the-court brief to express its support of Donald Trump’s failed travel ban on Muslims (the executive order blocked by federal judges) and becoming the first state in the Union to officially endorse the move. And in recent days, Paxton also has found the time to file a pair of other amicus briefs on issues ranging from his disdain for the idea of a diverse makeup on the State Bar of Texas board of trustees to his support of allowing people in Mississippi to refuse to do business with customers having different religious beliefs than theirs.

The lawsuit for which Paxton claims a lack of manpower was originally filed by the Texas Civil Rights Project, whose officials argue that Texas is failing to comply with the federal Motor Voter Act when people renew their driver’s license online, the Statesman explained.

Those renewing their license online are taken to a link to the Texas Secretary of State website enabling them to register to vote. But the lawsuit claims the process is confusing to the point that it leads untold thousands of Texans to believe their voter registration was automatically updated, according to the report.

Paxton’s legal team missed the first deadline set by the court to provide documents to the litigants by their Sept. 24 deadline. The requested documents weren’t provided as of three months later, prompting the judge to order another deadline for Jan. 13. Then, despite being granted a four-day deadline, Paxton’s team of lawyers said the request couldn’t be fulfilled before Feb. 8.

That’s when Garcia had enough: “Defendants apparently waited until receiving a court order to start gathering and reviewing the documents even though production should have been complete back in September,” the jurist wrote.

The net effect of the Texas delay was that Texas Civil Rights Project lawyers weren’t able to ask substantive questions when deposing witnesses and a delay in some depositions, the Statesman reported. Busting deadlines as Texas has done comes at a price, and now the state is on the hook to pay the Texas Civil Rights Project costs for preparing the motion for sanctions, according to the report.

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