John Cornyn burned through $100 million and still got crushed by Ken Paxton in the Texas Republican primary.
Now the outgoing senator is on what can only be described as a full-blown lame duck revenge tour, and his latest move is a real doozy. Cornyn publicly came out in favor of letting Democrats cast ballots in Republican primary elections, according to reports. He posted Friday that open primaries are simply "the law" and questioned why the GOP would ever want to "narrow our base of support leading into general elections."
Sounds nice and tidy, right? Yeah, except it completely crumbles under the slightest scrutiny.
Open primaries don't grow the Republican tent. What they actually do is hand the opposing party a golden ticket to meddle in GOP nominations. Democratic operatives across the country have openly talked about encouraging crossover voting to prop up the weakest possible Republican candidates, ones who either get destroyed in November or who govern like Democrats once they take office.
And the delicious irony here is almost too much to handle. The guy who just got demolished in a $100 million primary because GOP voters thought he wasn't conservative enough is now lobbying to make it easier for non-Republicans to pick Republican nominees. You cannot make this stuff up.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party of Texas and Attorney General Ken Paxton, the very man who walloped Cornyn with President Trump's backing, have filed a lawsuit pushing for closed primaries. Their argument is straightforward: open primaries let the opposition corrupt the GOP's own nomination process. New Texas Secretary of State Robert Howden has suggested the legislature should handle the matter rather than the courts, though he hasn't weighed in on which system he prefers.
Cornyn, however, isn't playing the neutral card. He's out there actively defending a system that lets Democrats water down Republican primary outcomes. The same system that Texas grassroots conservatives fought tooth and nail against.
But wait, there's more! Since his primary defeat, Cornyn has been racking up anti-Trump agenda positions like he's collecting stamps. He went against the SAVE America Act. He held up Todd Blanche's confirmation until the DOJ killed the weaponization fund. He abandoned an effort to rename a highway after Trump. And now he's championing open primaries.
See a pattern yet?
This is a man who dreamed of becoming Senate Majority Leader and instead wound up as a lame duck with a grudge. He's spending his remaining months in office protecting the establishment political infrastructure that props up donor-friendly moderate candidates, exactly the kind of candidate he was.
Texas Republican primary voters delivered their verdict loud and clear. Cornyn got rejected. And rather than taking the L gracefully, he's spending his final days in the Senate throwing elbows at the voters and the president who sent him packing. Classy stuff from the guy heading for the exit door.
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