The defeat of John Cornyn is a milestone in the downfall of the Republican party. His virtue for decades as a “steady conservative institutionalist”, as the New York Times described him, became his terminal liability. His expenditure of $92m, the greatest amount ever dropped by a candidate in a Senate primary, could not forestall his humiliation at the hands of the scoundrel Ken Paxton, with his lengthy rap sheet of allegations of bribery, abuse of office, felony securities fraud and impeachment by the Republican-controlled Texas House, along with his hostile divorce by his wife on “biblical grounds”. Despite Cornyn’s blast of TV ads against “Crooked Ken”, the “Home Wrecker”, Paxton, carrying the imprimatur of Donald Trump, trounced him by 28 points. Immediately after the primary, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which Cornyn had once led, set about scrubbing the ads as if there had been no Cornyn campaign at all and the villainous Paxton was the rightful successor to hold the Senate seat Cornyn had occupied for 24 years. The Orwellian erasure was a further measure of the relentless Trump effort to stamp out of existence the remnants of the old party and to build on its ashes his golden idol.
Cornyn’s ignominious rejection is not his alone. His loss represents the ongoing shattering of the Republican party whose foundations were laid by Ronald Reagan, laboriously built in Texas by the Bushes, both father and son, with their operative Karl Rove, and, within the Senate, where Cornyn arrived in 2002, the ruling Republican structure established by Mitch McConnell. Cornyn rode on the Reagan wave that swept aside Democrats in Texas, to be raised up as a factotum of the Bush operation, and serve as the indispensable conduit of funds from the oil and gas industry to fuel McConnell’s dark money machine that financed Republican candidates, destroyed campaign finance reform, and secured the conservative majority on the supreme court.
John Cornyn is an emblematic Republican of the interregnum between Reagan and Trump, shifting its identity from a conservative party for whom the business of America was business to a cult of personality smashing everyone and everything in its path to erect a kleptocracy and a ballroom. Cornyn, a stalwart of the old order, could not remove the fatal flaw of his past.
John Cornyn first met Karl Rove in the early 1980s. By then, Rove was the most influential political consultant in Texas, the “boy genius”, as he was called, of the state’s emergent Republican party. He had been selected chair of the College Republicans in 1973 by George HW Bush when he was Republican National Committee chair. By 1977, Rove was made the executive director of the political action committee run by James A Baker that became the basis of Bush’s presidential campaign in 1980. Two years earlier, Rove had been the political adviser to George W Bush in his failed congressional campaign and to William Clements, the first Republican elected governor of Texas in more than 100 years.
Rove created a political machine based on his direct mail firm, electing dozens of Republicans to statewide office. He developed a massive fundraising operation generating tens of millions of dollars by promoting the conservative cause of “tort reform”, working with corporate clients, among them insurance companies, the medical industry, and Phillip Morris and the tobacco lobby, to battle trial lawyers representing consumers pursuing lawsuits.
Rove enlisted Cornyn as a 32-year-old lawyer through his “tort reform” movement, and got him slated as a state district judge in 1984. Rove was determined to take over the Texas supreme court, had won three of its nine seats by 1988, and recruited Cornyn to run for the court in 1990. In 1998, Rove anointed Cornyn to run for state attorney general and helped raise more than $6m from his corporate allies to oust the incumbent Democrat who was going after the tobacco giants. Cornyn was swept in on a Republican wave that re-elected George W Bush governor, setting up his 2000 presidential campaign.
With Rove’s assistance, Cornyn as attorney general co-founded the national Republican Attorneys General Association, which raised millions for Republican attorney general campaigns across the country. In 2002, Rove worked to make Cornyn a US senator, to fill the seat vacated by Phil Gramm, who had been a Rove client. Cornyn campaigned as a loyal member of “Team Bush”.
In 2006, in Bush’s second midterm, the Republicans lost the Senate. With Bush fading as an unpopular lame duck, Cornyn was adopted by a new sponsor, Mitch McConnell, now the Senate minority leader. In 2009, McConnell put Cornyn in charge of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, where he raised more than $100m to enable the Republicans to retake the Senate in 2010. Cornyn was indeed a very popular man within the Senate Republican Conference and in 2012 McConnell made him the whip.
McConnell’s great causes were the destruction of campaign finance reform and packing the federal courts. His fundraising technique was more or less the same that Rove had applied to “tort reform” – a virtuous cycle of money, elections and judges: the corporations would finance the Republicans, who would approve federal judges who, in turn, would be favorable to the corporations.
Cornyn preserved and protected the system that grew out of the supreme court’s Citizens United 2010 decision, which allowed unlimited and unaccounted corporate campaign contributions. In the Senate, Cornyn battled the Democrats’ Disclose ACT, which would establish transparency about the identity of donors. Cornyn successfully killed it by attaching riders to appropriations bills that restricted the Securities and Exchange Commission from making disclosure rules about campaign donations.
Cornyn would raise at least $415m over the years for the Republican Pacs, becoming the top fundraiser after McConnell himself. Cornyn, however, never constructed his own fiefdom, but instead integrated everything he did into McConnell’s operation. Cornyn’s and McConnell’s networks were one and the same.
Cornyn’s operations also were tightly linked into the series of Pacs run by Leonard Leo, chair of the Federalist Society, selector of conservative judges, a tangle closely tied into McConnell’s groups. Cornyn’s former chief of staff Monica Popp headed a dark money group called the Conservative Majority Project, which in 2024 distributed $1.5m to Right Vote – a conservative non-profit mainly funded by Leo’s Concord Fund.
McConnell tolerated Trump in his first term so long as he churned out Federalist Society approved judges. But after Trump’s failed coup of January 6, the frail McConnell, who was in physical danger during the assault on the Capitol, denounced Trump, whom he considered “despicable,” certified the 2020 election of Joe Biden, and scoffed at Trump as politically finished, which was the reason he made sure Republicans did not remove Trump from office in the post-January 6 impeachment process. Trump unleashed a string of insults at McConnell as a “broken down hack” and “Old Crow”, and targeted McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, who was Trump’s Secretary of Transportation, as McConnell’s “China loving wife, Coco Chow!”
Cornyn, in McConnell’s shadow, and, before that, in Bush’s, could not help but become collateral damage. Trump’s rage eventually engulfed him – “VERY disloyal to me, as President,” Trump tweeted. Cornyn’s original sin in Trump’s mind was to certify the 2020 election, though he voted to acquit Trump in the impeachment case. He had followed the lead of McConnell.
Cornyn desperately tried to compensate in his re-election bid by posting a picture of himself staring at an open copy in his lap of The Art of the Deal as though he was absorbing its wisdom, then posing in front of a Trump-themed joint in Houston run by a Maga fanatic called Trump Burger, and, Cornyn’s coup de grace of flattery, introducing a bill that Interstate Highway 47 be renamed “Trump Interstate”. The toadyism apparently had the reverse effect of inciting Trump’s animosity. He endorsed the miscreant Paxton as “a true MAGA Warrior who has ALWAYS delivered for Texas”. Cornyn could not transfer his traditional method of obsequious advancement to Trump, who would not allow Cornyn to go along to get along. Cornyn’s attempt at loyalty was not cultish enough. Trump could still see McConnell and the Bushes and Rove through him.
Cornyn’s rise and fall is the story of the rise and fall of the Republican party that, whatever else might be said about it, was a political party. From the beginning of his career, Cornyn was the man behind the man, a dull, reliable and invaluable figure upon whom parties depend. Cornyn’s record as a dutiful man of the party condemned him. Despite his attempt to adapt himself to Trump, his doom was to remain inescapably himself. Running against an opponent ceaselessly defending himself against real criminal allegations, Cornyn’s indelible offense was being a Republican of his time, which he could never scrub to make himself acceptable.
