GOP Senator John Cornyn has a whole new problem
Sen. John Cornyn of Texas may be up for re-election in 2020, but he’s hardly looking forward to it, a sentiment he expressed back in February, fearing he could be in trouble due to the state’s rapidly changing demographics, not to mention he’ll be running with a historically unpopular presidential candidate at the top of the ticket.
Cornyn’s other problem is that he’s known as Mitch McConnell’s right-hand man in the Senate. As McConnell has an unfavorable reputation even among many conservative Republicans, this may not necessarily endear him to Trump’s base. This was all before he even had a candidate running against him – Air Force veteran and former congressional candidate, Mary Jennings Hegar, who announced she was running for his seat back in April.
Rather than touring the state extensively, like Beto O’Rourke did last year – putting up a formidable challenge for his opponent, Ted Cruz, or doing something that showed he was listening to his constituents, he took to Twitter to protest Bank of America. His reasoning? Bank of America recently announced it would cease doing business with companies that operated detention centers.
That’s right. Even while he and fellow senators worked this week to pass legislation that wouldn’t make them appear overly heartless in the wake of Donald Trump’s reprehensible border scandal, Cornyn is making it clear that he’s just another bigot in Trump’s base – with nothing to say about the six children who died in custody or the appalling conditions inside. Bigots like Cornyn are testing the waters – seeing how much disregard for human life it’s possible to get away with, and in effect, can be worse than Donald Trump.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making