Sen. John Cornyn (R)

John Cornyn, a Republican, was elected to the Senate in 2002. He was born in Houston and spent much of his childhood in San Antonio. His father was an oral pathologist in the Air Force stationed in Japan, where Cornyn went to high school. After his father retired from the service, the family settled in San Antonio. Cornyn graduated from Trinity University and St. Mary’s University Law School, both in San Antonio, in the 1970s. He practiced law for five years with a firm that defended doctors and insurance companies in medical malpractice cases. In 1984, he ran for district court judge on the Republican ticket in Bexar County and, at age 32, upset a strong favorite in the race. In 1990, Cornyn was elected to the state Supreme Court. In 1995, he wrote a 5-4 decision upholding the “Robin Hood” school finance system, in which property-wealthy school districts had to send money to property-poor districts. In 1997, he resigned from the court to run for attorney general, defeating two better-known opponents in the Republican primary. In the general election, he faced a grizzled veteran of Texas politics, Jim Mattox, a populist Democrat, a former U.S. House member from Dallas, and the second-place finisher to Ann Richards in the 1990 runoff for Texas governor. Cornyn won 54%-44%, becoming the first Republican attorney general in Texas since Reconstruction. He argued two cases before the U. S. Supreme Court, including the Santa Fe Independent School District’s defense of reading the Lord’s Prayer at football games (the Court nixed it).

When Republican Sen. Phil Gramm announced that he would not seek re-election in 2002, Cornyn got into the contest to succeed him. He had no serious opposition in the primary. Democrats nominated Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk, the son of the first black mailman in Austin, a teacher, and former aide to Democratic Sen. Lloyd Bentsen. He had been elected mayor of Dallas in 1995, and four years later, he was re-elected by a wide margin. In the primary, he overcame challenges from former U.S. Rep. Ken Bentsen of Houston, the senator’s nephew, and Victor Morales, a track coach from suburban Dallas. Morales finished just narrowly ahead of Kirk in the first round of balloting, and Bentsen was eliminated. In the four weeks before the runoff, Kirk was endorsed by Bentsen and Houston Mayor Lee Brown. In the lower-turnout runoff, he won 60%-40%.

In the general election, Cornyn ran as a supporter of President George W. Bush. He called for making Bush’s 2001 tax cuts permanent, for extending the research and development tax credit, and for raising Texas’s share of gas-tax funds from 90.5 cents to 95 cents of each dollar of gas-tax revenues. He supported government vouchers for private school tuition, individual investment accounts as part of Social Security and color-blind standards for college and university admissions. Kirk took an opposite stand on most of the issues but portrayed himself as a moderate Democrat who would support Bush on many issues. Republicans ran ads linking him to New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and liberal out-of-state contributors. Eventually he spent $8.9 million—almost as much as Cornyn’s $9.5 million.

Kirk campaigned with a sense of humor and considerable charm, making fun of his bald pate and answering—mindful of Texas mores—when asked whether he owned a gun, “I have a wife and two little girls. You figure it out.” But he made some mistakes. He opposed the nomination to a federal judgeship of Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen, something Republicans seized on in ads. He refused to disclose his income tax returns, except for allowing reporters one peek at his 2001 return. When Cornyn came out for a bill in the Texas Legislature requiring district attorneys to seek the death penalty for killers of law enforcement officials (the Austin district attorney had not sought the death penalty for the killer of a Travis County sheriff’s deputy), Kirk said Cornyn was acting like he was running for district attorney—and then had to apologize abjectly to a convention of law enforcement officials a few days later. Meanwhile, Cornyn met with the deputy’s widow. In San Antonio in September, Kirk said that Cornyn might not support military action in Iraq if the military forces were not “disproportionately ethnic [and] disproportionately minority.” He said he supported military action only if it met with international approval. Four days later he apologized and he endorsed the Iraq war resolution in October.

Texas Democrats called their ticket of Kirk for senator and Tony Sanchez for governor the “Dream Team” and hoped it would draw a large turnout of African-Americans and Hispanics. Meanwhile, Republicans quietly registered thousands of new voters in the heavily Republican and fast-growing suburban counties around Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio and Austin. Polls showed the race close in the spring. Democrats operated on the assumption that Kirk had to win 85% of blacks, 65% of Hispanics and 35% of whites to win. He clearly achieved the first and probably achieved the second of those goals, but failed by a solid margin to achieve the third. Cornyn won 55%-43%—almost the same numbers as in his race for attorney general in 1998 and a fair reflection of basic party identification in Texas in recent years. Kirk carried historically Republican Dallas County 50%-49%. But Cornyn carried the entire Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex 58%-41%. Cornyn also won metro Houston 55%-43% and the combined San Antonio and Austin metro areas 51%-47%. The border went 69%-29% for Kirk, a 148,000-vote margin. But rural Texas, much larger, went 62%-37% for Cornyn, a 346,000-vote margin. Kirk may have increased black turnout in Dallas, and Sanchez clearly increased Hispanic turnout in Laredo. But turnout was also up, from 25% to 52%, in the fast-growing counties around Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio and Austin, where Cornyn ran strong. He won the seat that dates to Sam Houston, who won it shortly after Texas was annexed in 1845, and later was occupied by Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson and Republican John Tower. Cornyn is also the first Texas senator to come from San Antonio, once the state’s largest city.

In 2009, Cornyn assumed a high-profile role in the Senate GOP leadership as the new chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which will raise money and recruit candidates for 2010 contests. His chief competitor for the post, Republican Norm Coleman of Republican, was eliminated by his failure to win his own re-election race in Minnesota. (After protracted vote counting, Democrat Al Franken was declared the winner in June 2009.) Cornyn said he planned to adopt the strategy of Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, who as the head of the Senate Democrats' campaign committee in the 2006 and 2008 election seasons recruited candidates who would appeal to electorates in states that had not necessarily been friendly to Democrats in recent presidential contests. Cornyn sought to recruit U.S. Rep. Mike Castle in Delaware, former Gov. George Pataki in New York and Gov. Charlie Crist in Florida. “I probably couldn’t get elected in places like the Northeast,” Cornyn said. “We’re going to have to find, as I think Chuck Schumer did, good candidates who can win in those states.”

Cornyn has been an active member of the Judiciary Committee. In 2003 and 2004, he chaired the Constitution Subcommittee and held hearings on continuity of government, hostility to religious expression in the public square and same-sex marriage. He proposed a constitutional amendment to give each house of Congress the authority to decide how vacancies would be filled if one-quarter or more of its members were killed or incapacitated. He was a lead sponsor of the amendment to ban same-sex marriage, which got less than 50 votes. He also supported amendments to expand the rights of crime victims and to overturn the Ninth Circuit decision banning the phrase “one nation under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. He cosponsored the class-action and bankruptcy bills opposed by trial lawyers but passed by the Senate and signed by Bush in 2005.

Cornyn supported Bush’s judicial nominees against Democrats who continually delayed and opposed the president’s selections. In 2005, he stirred some controversy when he asked “whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in violence.” A few months later, in March 2006, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor spoke out “against those who would strong-arm the judiciary. It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings”—a remark many took as a criticism of Cornyn’s statement. It was “hyperbole, to say the least,” Cornyn said. “There’s no danger of dictatorship while people feel free to express their views.” He took a lead role in seeking to confirm Bush appellate court appointees and urged colleagues to change the Senate rules to stop the Democratic filibusters. He was initially critical of the “Gang of 14,” a bipartisan group of senators who ultimately succeeded in hammering out a compromise on the explosive issue of changing Senate rules to stop filibusters. He later said, “In retrospect, I have to concede they actually broke the logjam that allowed us to get some very good people confirmed.”

In a split with the Bush administration in 2007, he criticized Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for his handling of the firings of U.S. attorneys and in August 2007 told the Austin American-Statesman, “The rest of it is really a matter of how he handled the inquiry, and I just think he has not handled that well.” On other issues as well, Cornyn sought areas of compromise with Democrats on the committee. With Democrat Patrick Leahy of Vermont, he moved to strengthen the Freedom of Information Act, proposing a bill that would penalize federal agencies and employees if they failed to respond to requests in a timely manner. A bill establishing a commission to consider changes in FOIA was approved unanimously by the Senate in 2005. The bill was passed in the Senate again in 2007 and later by the House. In 2009, he worked with Leahy to get more funding for public corruption investigations and prosecutions.

When he was the ranking Republican on the Senate Ethics Committee, Cornyn proposed in 2008 more stringent disclosure of members’ mortgages, and Democratic Chairman Barbara Boxer concurred. Under their leadership, the committee admonished Republican Larry Craig of Idaho after he was arrested in a homosexual sex sting at a Minneapolis airport and Republican Pete Domenici of New Mexico for his role in the attorneys general firings.

Cornyn’s hometown of San Antonio is only 150 miles from Mexico, and he has taken an interest in the immigration reform debate in recent years. He is also the ranking Republican on Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees and Border Security. One of Cornyn’s first successful bills reduced from three years to one the waiting period for citizenship for legal aliens serving in the armed forces. He has opposed military patrols of the border and the building of a fence along most of its length, which he says would disrupt life in South Texas. In 2006, he voted for the 700-mile border fence pushed by House Republicans, though he questioned whether it would be a “practical use” of federal money. In spring 2007, as Arizona Republican Jon Kyl negotiated an immigration bill with Massachusetts Democrat Edward Kennedy, Cornyn took some part in the negotiations but skipped an unveiling of the bill’s terms in May. Arizona Republican John McCain angrily accused him of raising arcane legal issues to scuttle the bill. Cornyn said of the talks, “I didn’t so much walk away as got chased away.” His amendment to bar illegal immigrants convicted of identity theft from legalization processes was defeated 51-46. From then on, he opposed the larger immigration bill.

Cornyn supported the Bush administration on the war in Iraq, including the president’s 2007 troop surge aimed at restoring order in Iraq. He said, “We know that if things spiral out of control in Iraq, that if we decide to precipitously leave Iraq and it becomes a failed state, or if it becomes a killing field for ethnic cleansing, that we will more likely have to return at even greater loss of blood and treasure.”

Cornyn began his campaign for re-election in 2008 with poll numbers showing he wasn’t as well-known or popular as his fellow Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas. But through the summer of 2007, the Democrats’ attempts to attract a well-known challenger failed. The Democratic nominee was Houston state Rep. Rick Noriega, who had served with the Texas Army National Guard in Afghanistan. He set a goal of raising $10 million but ultimately was able to raise only $4 million to Cornyn’s $17 million. Polls pretty consistently showed Cornyn ahead, though not by wide margins, and neither national party invested in the contest. Cornyn won 55%-43%, the same split as in 2002. He won 36% of the Hispanic vote, an improvement over 2002. He carried 223 of the state’s 254 counties, running behind only in the Rio Grande Valley and in the counties with the central cities of Houston, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio. He carried the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex 55%-43% and metro Houston 52%-46%.