John Cornyn spent Monday evening in Dallas raising money for Republican Senate candidates. Six of them, running in Maine, Ohio, Alaska, Iowa, Michigan, and New Hampshire, all channeled through a new joint committee with the unsubtle name Maintain the Majority. George W. Bush attended as the special guest.
Not invited: Texas state Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee for Senate from the state where the fundraiser was held.
Let’s be clear about what happened here. A Texas Republican brought in a former Republican president (from Texas, granted) to raise money for Republicans in New England and the upper Midwest, in a Texas ballroom, while pointedly refusing to lift a finger for the Republican on the Texas ballot. The candidate who beat him. The one whose race the national party’s own super PACs consider important enough to reserve more than $80 million in advertising for.
This is not a policy disagreement. It’s a grudge with a guest list. Cornyn hasn’t been subtle about it either. Since losing the primary, he has told Texas papers that Paxton lacks good moral character, that he’s a poor campaigner, that he’s lazy and doesn’t raise money. Some of that is even true — Paxton has badly trailed James Talarico in fundraising, which is precisely why a fundraiser would have been useful. But you don’t have to like Ken Paxton to notice that the sitting senator is spending the final months of his Senate tenure openly sabotaging the Republican nominee Texas voters chose over him.
And notice who’s helping. Establishment donors spent north of $130 million in that primary trying to stop Paxton, with Bush chipping in personally. They lost. Texas Republicans looked at the whole apparatus — the consultants, the donor network, the ad blitz — and chose the Trump guy anyway. Monday’s event was that apparatus announcing it still hasn’t accepted the verdict.
There’s a name for the position they’ve taken. Cornyn is saying every other Republican nominee in America is worth defending, but the one selected by the voters who rejected him personally is not. That isn’t a principle about character. It’s a temper tantrum with a catering budget.
Here’s the practical problem. Talarico is a well-funded Democrat in a state Republicans cannot afford to lose, and the Texas race is now consuming resources the party would otherwise be spending in Georgia or North Carolina. Every dollar Trump-aligned PACs pour into Texas is a dollar unavailable elsewhere. If the goal really is to maintain the majority, then Texas is part of the majority, and the guy on the ballot there is the guy.
Cornyn knows all this. He also knows he’s leaving in January, and he’s decided that settling his score matters more than the outcome. Bush, apparently, agrees.
Six weeks from now, one of two things will be true: Paxton wins in spite of them, or Texas sends a Democrat to the Senate for the first time in decades. Either way, everyone will remember exactly who was in that Dallas ballroom, raising money for everybody but the nominee from their own state.
