John Cornyn Is Owed No Revenge at the Expense of His Own Party

Ted Cruz was on Laura Ingraham’s show a couple of nights ago and he said something worth repeating…

WOW. Ted Cruz didn’t mince words with ‘moderate’ Republicans still upset over Ken Paxton winning the primary:

“My message to them is enough!

Stop your bitching!

We had a $200 million primary, and Ken won. And one of the reasons the numbers are close is because $200 million of… pic.twitter.com/muiWVzOgNH

— James Laverty (@jjlavs2) September 2, 2026

Cruz is talking about a dynamic within the Republican Party which has gone on for decades, and has especially been front and center since the days of the Tea Party. Namely, that the GOP establishment has demanded lockstep loyalty from its conservative base, particularly when some anti-establishment conservative upstart offers a primary challenge to an establishment incumbent and gets beaten back, and the establishment has generally received the support it has demanded in such cases because the alternative has been to put communists, or communist-adjacents, in positions of political power.

But sometimes, the upstarts win. More to the point, sometimes the establishment performs so poorly that the voters just can’t stomach it anymore and they send in a cleanup crew.

And that’s what Ken Paxton is.

Paxton beat John Cornyn 63.8 percent to 36.2 percent in the runoff back in May after President Trump’s late endorsement. This after Cornyn managed only 42 percent of the vote in the primary; Paxton wasn’t the only challenger; Wesley Hunt and a couple of minor candidates were also in that race. (RELATED: Advice for Ken Paxton)

That’s a double test of John Cornyn’s utility as a senator from Texas. Occupying the absolute heights of Senate seniority, by the way. Cornyn was the chair of the NRSC from 2009-2013 and the Senate’s Republican whip from 2013-19. He got 24 votes for Majority Leader last year when John Thune won the job after Mitch McConnell, whom Cornyn was a yes-man for, finally relinquished it. This guy was in a position to deliver on conservative policy for Texas voters, and he had two shots at closing the sale with the folks in his own party, while his camp spent tens of millions of dollars — they outspent Ken Paxton’s camp by EIGHTY MILLION BUCKS in a PRIMARY, for Pete’s sake — and the voters screamed “Go away!” at the top of their lungs. (RELATED: Beware the Renegade Caucus)

Let’s remember that Paxton offered Cornyn a lifeline. The Senate GOP establishment crowd was pressuring Trump to endorse Cornyn, and Trump was close to acceding to their demands, while making his own demand to pass the SAVE Act. And Paxton said he would pack up his campaign and go home, conceding the race to Cornyn, if the Senate would pass the bill. (RELATED: Five Quick Things: The Grand Senate Bargain?)

They didn’t pass it. Cornyn, with all his stroke on Capitol Hill, either couldn’t or wouldn’t move the needle.

On a piece of legislation which is essentially a no-brainer in front of the American people, and has since become the distilled, Everclear manifestation of why Republican voters absolutely despise the Washington establishment inside the party.

Was this full-frontal repudiation enough for Cornyn and his camp to get the message? Hell, no.

They went out and fleeced all the party’s corporate donors by warning that Ken Paxton, who can reasonably claim to be the most maligned and attacked politician in America not named Donald Trump and yet wins election after election, can’t win that Senate seat.

Except it turns out that between Paxton and Cornyn, it’s Cornyn who isn’t electable. When you outspend your opponent by $80 million, and you get boat-raced to the tune of 64-36, you look like an abject buffoon in making an electability argument against him.

Was this full-frontal repudiation enough for Cornyn and his camp to get the message? Hell, no.

First, he sends one of his staffers to work for James Talarico, the fake-Christian heretic trans-kids-loving communist state representative who’s proven to be a fleecer of donors on par with the Cornyn crowd, and then shrugs and says, essentially, “it’s a free country” when people notice. As though that fooled anybody. (RELATED: The Incredibly, Unacceptably Weird James Talarico)

Then he says he’ll “support the Republican ticket” by going to Maine, Alaska, and Michigan to campaign for Susan Collins, Dan Sullivan (the real one, not the fraudulent Democrat plant with the same name — at least, we think that’s who Cornyn is going to try to help), and Mike Rogers.

But not Paxton. Paxton, Cornyn says, is unfit and a lawbreaker. And he’s still saying Paxton is a general-election risk.

Read more The Great American Open

While Cornyn’s friends at the NRSC and the Senate Leadership Fund say they don’t have any money for Texas. As a result, Talarico and his California and New York puppetmasters have deluged the Texas airwaves with tens of millions of dollars for the last three months, which haven’t been answered by outside money from the GOP.

Cornyn put this on Trump. He said Trump can “write a check.” Right. In an attempt to assuage the damage that the $100 million in attack ads Cornyn’s camp threw at Paxton, which couldn’t stop the challenger from getting more than 60 percent of the vote against him.

The NRSC did set up a joint fundraising committee with Paxton. That happened in June. Has it done any good? Well, the NRSC and SLF hadn’t booked a single ad for this fall in Texas as of late August. Cruz’s Truth and Courage PAC has thrown $2 million in for Paxton; Lone Star Liberty, another conservative PAC, is in for $15 million in ads this month so far; Trump did an RNC fundraiser in Houston, and the GOP has a convention coming up in a couple of weeks in Dallas that will likely give Paxton some momentum. Greg Abbott, Texas’s longtime Republican governor, laid into Talarico a few days ago, calling him a “pathological liar” on national TV and pledging to help Paxton.

And there are finally some Senate Republicans going to bat for Paxton. But they aren’t the Cornyn people. Cruz has been joined by Mike Lee and Ron Johnson, who are among the few good guys in that caucus. John Kennedy has said he’s going to hit Texas, and Kennedy is out begging people to give Paxton money.

It isn’t an indictment against these guys that they’re jumping in now rather than sooner. Individually, there’s only so much they can do, and it’s better that they do it later than during the summer anyway. This is about the third party spends and the official outlets which are supposed to be backing the party’s candidates for the Senate. And instead of helping the nominee in the biggest red state, they left him on an island for three months while a Democrat of highly dubious heterosexuality (not that there’s anything wrong with that) who thinks meat is murder, capitalism is “oppressive,” God is “non-binary,” loves trans kids, and that there ought to be a welcome mat at the border got to outspend him 200 to 1 on the airwaves.

Despite all of this, Talarico is basically tied with Paxton. And all of the growth potential left in the race is Paxton’s. One poll only had him at +57 net with GOP voters, while Talarico is +93 with Democrats. And Republicans almost always rise after Labor Day, particularly if they’re Republicans who have won election after election like Paxton has.

Let’s not play the moral fitness game when the survival of the Republic is on the line.

Yes, but Paxton is a poopy-head, say the Cornynites. After all, he got impeached, and he’s proven to be a bad husband.

Except the impeachment piece was already litigated by the voters of Texas who overwhelmingly re-elected Paxton four years ago. As for the “bad husband” piece, enough already with that. The “good husbands” in American politics have poisoned this as a job requirement a very long time ago. Ken Paxton might be a bad husband; Talarico carries himself like he’s looking for a husband. Let’s not play the moral fitness game when the survival of the Republic is on the line.

What’s probably worst here is the blithering idiocy of it all. You’ve let your nominee, a proven vote-getter who smashed your candidate almost two to one with your voters, wither on the vine for the entire summer, and he’s still right there in the fight. Paxton might not beat Talarico by the same margin he beat Cornyn, but not since 1994 has a Democrat won a statewide race in Texas. Talarico isn’t the kind of cultural figure you’d expect to change that. He’s not Beto O’Rourke. O’Rourke wasn’t even O’Rourke, truly; in both cases these are manufactured products of out-of-state money from places Texans give a stink-eye to.

Forget about the polls, which prior to Labor Day are always terrible. The fundamentals say Paxton is the likely winner, even if it’s 51-49 like Cruz beat O’Rourke back in 2018. And should he win, Ken Paxton will go to Washington absolutely beholden to nobody but the voters in Texas who put him in office.

And whatever you think of Ken Paxton, when he shows up someplace he’s all out of bubble gum.

This is somebody who filed more than 100 lawsuits against the Biden administration in four years. He’s the guy who had the stones to sue Pennsylvania over its… ahem… irregularities during the 2020 presidential election. The skins on his wall are legitimate: overtime threshold, Title IX/trans school rules, energy-efficiency mandates, highway-emissions rules, parole-in-place, HHS obstruction of state abortion/transition investigations. He’s kicked Meta’s rear end several times and wrangled multi-billion-dollar settlements out of them. No AG in the country has done more good in fighting the federal administrative state and the abuses of Big Corporate America at the same time like Paxton has.

And you want to piss this guy off after he’s already annihilated your candidate in front of the voters? Just how stupid are you people?

It’s better that John Cornyn sits out this cycle. The good he and his friends can do for “the Republican ticket” is of pretty scant value. As for the rest of the snot-nosed establishment who have micturated on the party’s nominee for the last three months, the message is simpler, and it’s one conservatives are very familiar with…

Shut up and get in line. Now, dammit.

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