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 of the scoundrel Ken Paxton, with his lengthy rap sheet of allegations of bribery, abuse of office, felony securities fraud and impeachment 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 with their operative Karl Rove, and, within the Senate, where Cornyn arrived in 2002, the ruling Republican structure established 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. “boy genius”, as he was called, of the state’s emergent Republican party.
He had been selected chair of the College Republicans in 1973 1977, Rove was made the executive director of the political action committee run ’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 “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.