Earlier this week, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) called on FBI Director Kash Patel to track down Democrats in the State House of Representatives who fled to blue states to break quorum.
Texas Democrats fled to places like California, New York and Illinois after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called a special session at the behest of Donald Trump to redraw Texas’s congressional maps in the middle of the decade to give Republicans give more seats.
On Thursday, the FBI granted Cornyn’s request, and Cornyn preened. Specifically, he criticized Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for not going after the Democrats. On the surface, Cornyn’s acts might make a casual politics observer wonder what that has to do with the price of crude in Houston?
But Paxton is now running in the Republican primary to unseat Cornyn next year. In response, Cornyn has spent the last few months prostrating himself before Trump, taking photos in front of Trump Burger in Houston and photographing himself reading Trump’s book The Art of the Deal.
It’s the latest instalment in one of the ugliest Senate fights in the country, and one that could determine the fate of the GOP in their biggest state. The Independent’s newsletter Inside Washington ranked the Senate race as the fifth most likely to flip given Paxton’s extensive baggage.
Understanding the feud requires some history. As Texas became solidly Republican on the national level after native Texan Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act like the rest of the South, Democrats continued to dominate on the state level. Then George W. Bush won the governorship in 1994. Bush’s 1998 re-election opened the floodgates and Cornyn became the first Republican elected attorney general since Reconstruction.
That began Texas Republicans’ dominance in the state. The same year Cornyn became a senator in 2002, Texas Republicans took over the legislature and Abbott became attorney general. Cornyn moved up the ladder, becoming Senate majority whip and a staunch conservative on economic policy to the U.S.-Mexico border.
To many conservatives, he’s a RINO and a vestige of the past. That came into starker relief when after a shooter at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde killed 19 children and two adults, he negotiated a gun control bill with Democrats that Joe Biden signed. For gun-loving Texas conservatives, that was an unforgivable sin.
In 2014, Cornyn’s successor as attorney general – Abbott – became governor while Paxton became attorney general and a darling of the right. MAGA lauded him for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election; he even spoke at the White House Ellipse on January 6, though he did not participate in the riot that followed.
Paxton also faced numerous scandals, facing federal indictment almost as soon as he became attorney general, though the charges were dismissed after he finished a restitution agreement. Despite this, in a poetic move, Paxton beat Bush’s nephew George P. Bush in the primary in 2022. But in 2023, his fellow Republicans in the state House impeached him, though Trump intervened at the last minute and the Texas Senate acquitted him.
Now conservatives want to target Cornyn, whom they see as the last of the Bush Republicans they despise, while establishment Republicans fear Paxton’s baggage could cost them a Senate seat in what should be a safe state.
Last month, Paxton’s wife Angela, who was a state senator who had to hear about the attorney general’s affairs during the impeachment trial, announced she would divorce Ken on “on biblical grounds,” a signal suggesting Ken had been unfaithful since the Bible permits divorce for infidelity.
This explains why Cornyn is rushing to Paxton’s right flank and the National Republican Senatorial Committee has released an ad praising Cornyn. Cornyn fears not only for his Senate seat, but also that if Paxton wins, the Democrats might get a foothold.
The whole reason Republicans called this special session was to use their victory in Texas to shore up future elections and a Paxton primary victory could make that all for naught and allow for the Democrats to be at least competitive in the Lone Star State.
If that happens, Republicans will now have to fight for a state they long considered safe and it could change the political calculus. After all, they did the same in Texas many years ago.
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