No Par­ty For John Cornyn

Pol­i­tics

No Par­ty For John Cornyn

The out­go­ing Tex­an sen­a­tor has failed to adapt to Trump’s GOP.

Short­ly after the 2024 elec­tion, John Cornyn near­ly became the Sen­ate major­i­ty leader. Today, he’s at war with his own par­ty after suf­fer­ing an embar­rass­ing pri­ma­ry defeat. He wants to fight for his own par­tic­u­lar brand of Repub­li­can­ism and defy Pres­i­dent Trump’s agen­da.

But Cornyn is fight­ing a los­ing bat­tle. His down­fall illus­trates the trans­for­ma­tion of the Amer­i­can Right over the past decade, a devel­op­ment I cov­er in my new book, Whitepill. Cornyn no longer has a home in Trump’s par­ty. Con­ser­vatism has changed dra­mat­i­cal­ly over the last decade, leav­ing lit­tle room for Cornyn to advance his Busi­ness First Repub­li­can­ism.

Cornyn has long been one of the most dubi­ous Sen­ate Repub­li­cans. Before Don­ald Trump left office in 2021, the Texas sen­a­tor pub­licly trashed his party’s leader. He didn’t like Trump’s tough stance on ille­gal immi­gra­tion and felt the Repub­li­can Par­ty need­ed to move in a mod­er­ate direc­tion after the Don left office. 

He did his best to steer the GOP in that direc­tion after 2020. Cornyn pri­mar­i­ly con­cerned him­self in the Biden years with push­ing for the GOP to embrace lib­er­al immi­gra­tion leg­is­la­tion, make June­teenth a fed­er­al hol­i­day, and sup­port for­eign inter­ven­tions. Through­out the ear­ly 2020s, Cornyn led nego­ti­a­tions with Democ­rats on a com­pro­mise immi­gra­tion deal. When the Sen­ate passed a bill plac­ing restric­tions on some gun pur­chas­es in 2022, Cornyn said immi­gra­tion would be the next “bipar­ti­san” mea­sure he would shep­herd into law. He nev­er achieved his dream, despite his best efforts. He tried to get Con­gress to give per­ma­nent legal­iza­tion …