The weak-kneed Republican RINO. Elephas Minimus, or the spineless elephant. The Senate species commonly referred to as Republican in Name Only is hardly endangered, but conservative voters have been thinning their ranks.
The latest to fall is bull RINO John Cornyn, a four-term Texas senator manufactured in an establishment Republican lab.
Cornyn was summarily dismissed in Tuesday’s primary runoff election, suffering a 27-point shellacking to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Cornyn’s crushing defeat arrived one week to the day after President Donald Trump delivered his coveted endorsement to Paxton, whom the GOP’s top dog described as a “true MAGA warrior.”
Cornyn’s unprecedented defeat was another strong message sent by motivated Republican primary voters: fail the MAGA movement at your own political peril.
‘The Primary Process was Bruising’
Cornyn’s support of Trump and his policies has long been conditional, dependent on which way the Texas senator believed the political winds to be blowing. He’s not alone on that front. Plenty of his Senate colleagues have done the same. For Cornyn, his fickle loyalty to Trump and key conservative values proved costly.
In 2016, after Trump emerged victorious from a bareknuckle nomination battle, Cornyn held his nose and said he would support the Republican Party’s nominee.
“We all know that the primary process was bruising and a lot of different choices (emerged). But we have to respect the choices made by the voters and I do, and I would consider Mr. Trump to be preferable to Secretary Clinton,” he said in a June 2016 speech to the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce.
While a longtime vocal proponent of border security, Cornyn has more than flirted with the amnesty ambassadors in his party, in 2021 backing a DACA deal that would have given open-border Democrats an amnesty victory. And he was a critic of Trump’s early campaign pledge to build a border wall. The member of the august Senate found such talk unseemly, divisive. Trump, Cornyn told conservative radio talk show host Joe “Pags” Pagliarulo in 2016, was a business guy and political outsider who didn’t “have the experience of visiting places like the border and appreciating the complexity of it … so he says things that are just jarring.”
To a lot of Second Amendment advocates, Cornyn is a traitor. The senator in 2022 “teamed up with President Joe Biden” and Democrat Sen. Chris Murphy to pass “the largest federal gun control package in over 30 years,” according to the National Association for Gun Rights.
The bill funded — to the tune of $750 million in taxpayer money — expanded “Red Flag” gun confiscation initiatives, empowered Biden’s Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco and Explosives to target private gun sales, and created a “lifetime gun ban for many young Americans through a new federal registration scheme.” Gun owner rights groups like the National Association for Gun Rights made sure conservative voters remembered the RINO’s “Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.”
SAVE Acting
More recently, Cornyn was one of the faces of the Republican majority’s failure to pass the SAVE America Act, a critical election integrity package that, at its core, is aimed at blocking noncitizens from registering and voting in U.S. elections. As The Federalist reported earlier this month, Paxton, unlike Cornyn, was willing to sacrifice his Senate run for the sake of a critical election integrity bill that Trump has described as his “top priority.”
In early March when it appeared that the president was about to give his endorsement to Cornyn, Paxton said he would “consider dropping out of this race if Senate Leadership agrees to lift the filibuster and passes the SAVE America Act.”
Cornyn was then forced to reconsider his opposition to nuking the Senate filibuster to pass the election integrity bill on a simple majority vote. But Capitol sources have told The Federalist that Cornyn and other RINOs fear seeing the act come up for an actual floor vote.
The SAVE America Act is an extremely popular bill. Cornyn’s lukewarm support for it and Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s failure theater performance leading to the bill’s burial didn’t help Cornyn’s cause.
In the end, Texas conservatives wanted a fighter, a warrior for the MAGA movement. Cornyn wasn’t it.
Get the Message
It’s the same story in Louisiana, where Republican voters earlier this month sent Sen. Bill Cassidy packing after two terms in the upper house. Cassidy fell out of favor with Trump after he voted to convict the president in the Democrat-led witch hunt impeachment trial in early 2021. Trump endorsed Cassidy’s challenger, Julia Letlow, R-La., who will face Louisiana state Treasurer John Fleming in the GOP’s primary runoff.
Cassidy took to X earlier this week to air his grievances and paint himself once again as a great American hero.
“At its best, America has renewed itself through leaders who understood that public office is a responsibility, not a performance,” Cassidy said. “The American people do not expect perfection from their leaders, but they do expect seriousness.”
The American people expect action. They’ve gotten little beyond performance from a Republican majority in a Senate filled with RINOs afraid to lead, to heed the mandate the American voter gave them in 2024’s change election.
But Louisiana and Texas should be a wake-up call for establishment Republicans and their massive ad campaigns to save primaried establishment Republicans. Business as usual in the stodgy Senate is no longer acceptable. Conservatives are driving out RINOs who fail to get that message.
