By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, May 20, 2026
Sen. John Cornyn of Texas is no Sam Houston. But—at the
risk of giving a hostage to Fate—it appears that his political career is likely
to end the way Houston’s did: He is not a big enough lunatic for Texas, a state
that loves its drama, and Texans are poised to send him into an involuntary
retirement.
Sam Houston, who had been the first and third president
of the Republic of Texas and later served as Texas’ seventh governor, has a very complicated history on the issue of slavery: He
owned slaves himself and supported Southern slavery, but he also opposed the
expansion of slavery into the Western territories and was a committed Unionist.
Texans would later come to revere Houston—you can see a 67-foot-tall statue of
him between one Buc-ee’s and the next on I-45 in Huntsville—but they reviled
him 1861, when he was removed from office after refusing to swear an oath of
allegiance to the newly formed Confederate States of America. Houston was, on
the question of secession, on the right side—and my fellow Texans, being
Texans, hated him for it.
Evidently, Cornyn is not crazy enough for the White
House, either: Donald Trump has just endorsed his primary runoff opponent,
Texas’s clownish and scandal-plagued attorney general, Ken Paxton.
Sen. Cornyn has a great big bucket where his principles
should be, and, thus equipped, he has been a committed and generally effective
water carrier for the Republican Party for many years. All he needed was to see
an “R” next to someone’s name: He carried water for Sen. Arlen Specter of
Pennsylvania when that is what party interests required, and then he carried
water for Specter’s Republican opponent after Specter defected to the
Democrats. Sen. Cornyn carried water for so-called establishment Republicans
when they opposed Donald Trump in 2016 and then carried—and contentedly
carries—water for Trump now that Trump has become the establishment.
(The fact that the story contains names such as “Specter”
and “Trump” sometimes makes it sound as if Cornyn’s political biography were
being written by Ian Fleming.)
Donald Trump routinely denounces his critics as “disloyal
to the Republican Party” (his verbatim description of Rep. Thomas Massie, the
Kentucky libertarian who has sometimes chided Trump over his weakness for
profligate spending), but Trump is, in all things, first and foremost a liar,
and he does not give a fig about party loyalty: Trump cares about loyalty to
Trump, and the more cynical reader here might reasonably substitute
“subservience” or “servility” or “slavish boot-licking” for “loyalty.” Far from
being a party man, Trump has made a point of defeating Republicans who are
inconvenient to him, whether they be obscure Indiana state legislators who
declined to follow Texas’ gerrymandering example or state-level election officials who declined to participate in
his 2020-2021 attempt at a coup d’état.
Texans have a whole thing about drawing a line in the
sand. Sen. Cornyn’s problem is that Texans seem to prefer a man who is on the wrong
side of the line to a man who is on both sides of it.
Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who is poised to
unseat Cornyn in a primary runoff next week, is the perfect specimen of a
Trump-era Republican—a grotesque amalgam of personal, financial, political, and
sexual corruption—who provides the definitive answer to a question that had
been on many minds: Exactly how big of a putz does a Republican have to be to
get himself impeached by Republicans in Texas? (The estranged wife who divorced
Paxton on grounds of adultery—the adultery that helped to get him impeached—is
a state senator who, bless her heart, declined to vote in favor of convicting
the husband who betrayed her, sitting out his impeachment proceedings—and I
suppose only Shaggy has the answer to that mystery.) Paxton is a buffoon
and an incompetent and absolutely devoted to Donald Trump, another buffoon and
incompetent.
And Texans—enough of them—seem to love him for it.
Texas goes through these phases from time to time.
Imagine a rich, middle-aged car salesman who ditches his wife and starts dating
a 21-year-old stripper with a meth problem, and then imagine that guy is a
state—that’s Texas, Anno Domini 2026. With a slowing economy, rising prices, and the slow but steady
creep of problems very similar to those facing other states—housing,
infrastructure, etc.—Texas has some real issues facing it. It also has some
imaginary issues facing it, such as the supposed
takeover of … the Dallas suburbs … by Islamist radicals. Texas Republicans,
having not very much useful to say about the real issues, currently are focused
on the imaginary ones.
Politically speaking, that is still working for Texas
Republicans. For now.
Conservatives have been working to save the Republican
Party—in Texas and elsewhere—from itself. Perhaps it is time to give up that
project. Like the car salesman with the meth-head paramour, the heart
wants what it wants.
And if Selena Gomez isn’t your kind of sage, there’s
always Livy: Eventus stultorum magister est.
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