Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn questioned why House Republicans would investigate Democrats’ never-ending witch hunt against former President Donald Trump’s in a threatened arrest Tuesday.
On Saturday, Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy ordered GOP-led committees to probe Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s “outrageous abuse of power” in “pursu[ing] political vengeance against President Trump.” Bragg was elected to the high-profile Manhattan DA office on a platform to prosecute Trump with money from leftist financier George Soros.
“I’m directing relevant committees to immediately investigate if federal funds are being used to subvert our democracy by interfering in elections with politically motivated prosecutions,” McCarthy said.
Most Republicans might view an effort to probe banana republic-style prosecutions of the leading contender for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination as a noble check on democratic institutions. Cornyn, however, was left perplexed by McCarthy’s announcement.
“There’s more than enough to do,” Cornyn told Politico. “I would hope they would stick to the agenda they ran on when they got elected to the majority.”
Bragg’s office is reportedly nearing an indictment of Trump that would lead to the first arrest of a former president in American history. The Manhattan prosecutor alleges Trump criminally mischaracterized payments to porn performer Stormy Daniels.
The case was revived after Democrats exhausted nearly every effort to accomplish the top item on their policy agenda in Trump’s criminal conviction. When Bragg was a U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York and Trump was still in the White House, Bragg’s team looked into the case and decided it was too weak to pursue.
On Tuesday, Cornyn also compared the current war in Eastern Europe to World War II when responding to criticism of U.S. involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war.
“Ukrainian President VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY ‘didn’t want to appeal to the hearts of Americans, in other words, but to their heads,'” Cornyn tweeted with a link to The Atlantic piece he quoted. “[T]his was his answer: Help us fight them here, help us defeat them here, and you won’t have to fight them anywhere else.”
“Stop risking our security and wasting our money on stupid wars that have nothing to do with us,” wrote Federalist CEO Sean Davis.
“Channeling Neville Chamberlain, I see,” Cornyn wrote back.
Last summer, Cornyn faced boos in his home state’s GOP convention after surrendering Americans’ rights to Democrats on gun control.
[READ: Sen. John Cornyn Booed At Texas GOP Convention Over Willingness To Surrender To Democrats On Guns]