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Tag: john cornyn
John Cornyn

'Hard To Run From Prison, Ken': Senator Rips Indicted Texas Attorney General

Former Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-TX) is among the Senate Republicans who is being mentioned as a possible replacement for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who on Wednesday announced that he is retiring from that position. The 82-year-old McConnell plans to serve out the rest of his term, which doesn't end until January 3, 2027, but he is stepping down as GOP leader in the U.S. Senate in November.

Far-right Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is hoping that someone other than Cornyn will be chosen. Although the conservative Cornyn has endorsed Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, Paxton believes that he isn't MAGA enough.

Paxton, who has been battling legal problems — including securities fraud charges — but survived an impeachment effort in the Texas legislature, attacked Cornyn in a February 28 post on X (formerly Twitter).

The Texas AG wrote, "It will be difficult for @JohnCornyn to be an effective leader since he is anti-Trump, anti-gun, and will be focused on his highly competitive primary campaign in 2026. Republicans deserve better in their next leader and Texans deserve another conservative Senator."

Cornyn, in response to Paxton's tweet, posted, "Hard to run from prison, Ken."

Paxton has been battling legal problems for almost a decade.

In 2015, Paxton was serving his first term as Texas attorney general when he was indicted on securities fraud charges And his legal problems have persisted; the case has been delayed but is scheduled to go to trial in April. Paxton, as Cornyn mentioned, is still in danger of going to prison.

Despite his legal problems, Paxton was reelected as state attorney general in 2018 and won a third term in 2022.

Paxton, in 2023, was impeached in the GOP-controlled Texas House of Representatives, and fellow Republicans argued that acts of corruption and allegations of bribery made him unfit to continue serving as Texas attorney general. But he was later acquitted in an impeachment trial in the Texas Senate, where Republicans also have a majority.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

John Cornyn

Why Republican Politicians Fear Another Trump Nomination In 2024

When Donald Trump recently revived his quest to overturn the Affordable Care Act of 2010 , a.k.a. Obamacare, he not only gave Democratic strategists and organizers an issue to use against him in 2024 — he also forced Republicans to have a conversation that many of them were hoping to avoid. Efforts to overturn the ACA proved to be a major liability for Republicans in 2018 and 2020, and a KFF poll released earlier this year found that 59 percent of Americans had a favorable view of the law.

In an article published by Politico on December 4, journalists Burgess Everett, Olivia Beavers and Meridith McGraw cite Trump's unpopular campaign against Obamacare as the type of thing Republicans in Congress will have to contend with if Trump is the 2024 GOP presidential nominee — which, according to countless polls, appears likely.

"Trump's recent call to replace the Affordable Care Act is triggering a particularly unwelcome sense of deja vu within the GOP," the Politico journalists report . "Even as many Senate Republicans steered away from Trump over the past couple years, now they're increasingly resigned to another general election that could inundate them with the former president's often fact-averse and hyperbolic statements. But Hill Republicans are girding to treat Trump the third-time nominee the same way they did Trump the neophyte candidate and then president."

Everett, Beavers and McGraw continue , "They're distancing themselves and downplaying his remarks, which touch on policy stresses like his urge to end Obamacare and political grievances like his vow to come down 'hard' on MSNBC for its unfavorable coverage."

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), a conservative Trump critic, recalled how frustrating it was for members of Congress when Trump was unprepared from a policy standpoint.

Romney told Politico, "He says a lot of stuff that he has no intention of actually doing. At some point, you stop getting worried about what he says and recognize: We'll see what he does."

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) acknowledges that things could be chaotic for Republicans in Congress if Trump is 2024's GOP presidential nominee.

Cornyn told Politico, "I'm under no illusions what that would be like. If it's Biden and Trump, I'm gonna be supporting Trump. But that's obviously not without its challenges."

When Politico asked if fellow House Republicans are worried about having to work with Trump again, Rep. David Joyce (R-OH), responded, "S*** yeah. Orange Jesus?"

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

McConnell

Senate Republicans Insist They Won't Ban Abortion, Despite McConnell Gaffe

For decades, Republicans have assailed pro-abortion Supreme Court rulings — for instance, 1973’s Roe v. Wade and 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey, among others -- but with the end of Roe reportedly imminent, conservative Congressional representatives are quickly dialing back their anti-abortion rhetoric, fearing public reaction could cost them in the midterms.

Despite secretly meeting with leading anti-abortion activists to brainstorm plans for a federal ban on abortions nationwide, GOP lawmakers were quick to dismiss Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s weekend suggestion that the party could soon turn its sights to enacting a total abortion ban.

"I don't think it's really an appropriate topic for Congress to be passing a national law on," said Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), according to CNN.

Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO), a religious rightist, echoed Cornyn, telling Newsweek, "No, I don't support a federal ban on abortion after Roe vs. Wade, if it's overturned in the first instance."

Hawley added, "I think it would be better for states to debate this, allow it to breathe and for Congress to act where there's national consensus."

Senator John Barrasso (R-WY), the third-ranking Senate Republican, noted that the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion suggested that states should regulate abortion. "I want to see the states have that opportunity and the authority to do so," Barrasso said when asked for his thoughts on a potential federal abortion ban.

Republicans in Congress are trying to keep focus trained on inflation, crime, and border security, as recent polls show that most Americans oppose national legislation to ban abortion. So they want to talk about almost anything else.

“You need — it seems to me, excuse the lecture — to concentrate on what the news is today,” McConnell himself said last Tuesday. “Not a leaked draft but the fact that the draft was leaked.”

Last week, in an interview with USA Today, McConnell promised that Republicans, if they win back the Senate, won’t scrap the filibuster for a total abortion ban by a simple majority vote.

"If the leaked opinion became the final opinion, legislative bodies — not only at the state level but at the federal level — certainly could legislate in that area," the minority leader told the paper. "And if this were the final decision, that was the point that it should be resolved one way or another in the legislative process. So yeah, it's possible."

However, McConnell dodged questions from CNN on whether he’d bring an abortion bill to the floor of a Republican-controlled Senate.

Democrats immediately decried McConnell’s abortion ban suggestion, and GOP lawmakers, sensing a rapidly spreading wave of public outrage at attempts to overturn abortion rights, have expressed little interest in it or noted that there wouldn’t be enough votes to enact such a ban.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) played down the notion his party would have the votes for a total national abortion ban. "It's about as possible as this vote we will take on Wednesday," Graham told CNN, referring to an upcoming Democratic effort to codify in federal law .

"Let's see what happens. I'm not going to get into what-ifs," Senator Shelley Moore Capito said, declining an opportunity to weigh in on the matter.

Senator John Thune (R-SD) declared his support for an abortion ban with exceptions, but noted that his stand might not be a consensus within his party. "That's my personal position," Thune said. "That's certainly not a caucus position. I don't think we have any idea at this point about any of that."

Despite sudden Republican back-pedaling on abortion, Democrats have signaled their intention to use the looming Supreme Court ruling to ask voters to punish Republicans in November.

Republicans Push Racist Lies About Biden’s Supreme Court Promise

Republicans Push Racist Lies About Biden’s Supreme Court Promise

Senate Republicans are attacking President Joe Biden over his plan to name a Black woman as his nominee to the Supreme Court, framing Biden's vow to do so as "racial discrimination" and charging that whoever he picks will be "quota" beneficiary.

During his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden promised that if elected he would nominate the first Black female justice in the Supreme Court's 233-year history. When Justice Stephen Breyer announced his impending retirement on Jan. 27, Biden reaffirmed that he would keep that promise.

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) complained a day later that any Black woman Biden picks will have an inherent conflict of interest on the job.

"The irony is that the Supreme Court is at the very same time hearing cases about this sort of affirmative racial discrimination while adding someone who is the beneficiary of this sort of quota," he told a Mississippi radio network. The court announced Monday that it will hear a case about whether college admissions decisions can take race into account.

On an episode of his weekly podcast titled "Only Black Women Need Apply," Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) suggested on January 30 that Biden's move was the real racial discrimination.

"The fact that he's willing to make a promise at the outset that it must be a Black woman, I gotta say that's offensive. Black women are, what, six percent of the U.S. population? He's saying to 94 percent of Americans, 'I don't give a damn about you,'" Cruz charged.

"It's actually an insult to Black women," he added. "If he came and said 'I'm gonna put the best jurist on the court,' and he looked at a number of people and he ended up nominating a Black woman, he could credibly said 'Okay, I'm nominating the person who's most qualified.' He's not even pretending to say that."

In recent days, other Senate Republicans have also attacked Biden over his pledge.

Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley used racist dog-whistle language on Wednesday, warning Biden not to "continue to tear apart this country w/ a woke activist," a term he frequently uses to belittle people who oppose systemic racism.

On January 27 Hawley told CNN, "I think it sends the wrong signal to say that, 'Well if a person is of a certain ethnic background, that we don't care what their record is, we don't care what their substantive beliefs are.' That would be extraordinary."

The same day, Texas Sen. John Cornyn retweeted a message posted by a former nominations counsel to the Judiciary Committee under then-Chair Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) charging that Biden and Senate Democrats "only pretend to care about diversity," based on the fact that they opposed the nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals of right-wing California jurist Janice Rogers Brown, a Black woman, 17 years ago.

On Sunday, Maine Sen. Susan Collins told ABC News that Biden's campaign promise had "helped politicize the entire nomination process."

But there is precedent for the approach. In 1980, candidate Ronald Reagan promised to appoint the first female justice to "one of the first Supreme Court vacancies in my administration." A year later, President Reagan kept that promise with the nomination of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

In 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump released two lists of far-right people he'd consider for Supreme Court vacancies; all were white men. He also vowed that any nominees he picked would vote to overturn the Roe v. Wade abortion rights ruling. Collins made no charges of politicization when she voted to confirm one of them, Neil Gorsuch, in 2017.

In 2020, Trump announced that he would pick a woman to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, though he did not yet know who. Republicans did not accuse him of politicizing the process.

Biden has not yet announced his pick. Breyer has said he plans to retire after the current term ends this summer, assuming his successor is confirmed by then.

Reprinted with permission from American Independent