Sen. John Cornyn (R) Elected 2002, 1st term up 2008
Born:	Feb. 2, 1952, Houston
Home:	San Antonio
Education:	Trinity U., B.A. 1973, St. Mary's Law Schl., J.D. 1977, U. of VA, L.L.M. 1995
Religion:	Church of Christ
Marital Status:	married (Sandy)
Elected  Office:	San Antonio Dist. Ct. judge, 1984-90; TX Sup. Ct., 1990-97; TX Atty. Gen., 1998-2002.
Professional Career:	Practicing atty., 1977-84.
DC Office	517 HSOB20510, 202-224-2934; Fax: 202-228-2856; Web site: cornyn.senate.gov
State Offices	Austin, 512-469-6034; Dallas, 972-239-1310; Harlingen, 956-423-0162; Houston, 713-572-3337; Lubbock, 806-472-7533; San Antonio, 210-224-7485; Tyler, 903-593-0902.
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John Cornyn, a Republican, was elected to the Senate in 2002. He was born in Houston and grew up in San Antonio. He graduated from high school in Japan; his father was an oral pathologist in the Air Force stationed there and after retiring from the service settled in San Antonio and taught at the University of Texas Health Science Center. John 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 upset a strong favorite in the race.

In 1990 he was elected to the state supreme court as a Republican. Cornyn generally ruled for defendants in tort cases, but not always; he dissented in 1995 from a decision that stripped juries of the right to determine the credibility of expert witnesses. The same year 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. In the March 1998 Republican primary and runoff he defeated two better-known opponents. In the general election he faced a grizzled veteran of Texas politics, Jim Mattox, a populist-sounding Democrat, congressman from Dallas from 1976 to 1982, attorney general from 1982 to 1990, second place finisher to Ann Richards in the 1990 primary and runoff for governor. Cornyn won 54%-44%.

Cornyn was the first Republican attorney general 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).

Cornyn had been planning to run for reelection in 2002. But on September 4, 2001, Senator Phil Gramm announced that he would not run for reelection. Cornyn immediately set out to run for the Senate and seemed to have the support of George W. Bush. Cornyn announced September 21 and said he hoped to raise $6 million for the March primary, he had no serious opposition there and didn't raise that much until later. National Democrats found a Texas candidate they liked: Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk. Kirk had an interesting life story: he is black, the son of the first black mailman in Austin and a teacher; he graduated from the University of Texas and its law school and was an aide to Senator Lloyd Bentsen. In 1995 he was elected mayor of Dallas and in 1999 he was reelected by a wide margin. In 2001 he announced he was resigning as mayor and in January 2002 he announced he was running for the Senate.

Kirk was not the only Democrat who ran. Another was Congressman Ken Bentsen of metro Houston, nephew of Senator and Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen. But neither Kirk nor Bentsen ran first in the March primary. That place went to Victor Morales, a geography teacher and track coach from the Dallas suburb of Crandall, who raised $7,000 for his campaign. Morales had won the nomination to run against Gramm in 1996 with 36% of the vote against two former congressmen; his main assets were his Hispanic identity and the fact that he had the same last name as Attorney General Dan Morales. (This scenario may recur as more Hispanics enter politics. There are many fewer surnames among American Hispanics than among American Anglos.) In 2002 Morales won 33.2% of the vote in the primary, to 33.1% for Kirk and 27% for Bentsen. In the four weeks before the runoff, Kirk was endorsed by Bentsen and Houston Mayor Lee Brown. In the lower-turnout runoff, Kirk won 60%-40%.

In the general election Cornyn ran as a supporter of George W. Bush, and of making the 2001 tax cuts permanent, extending the research and development tax credit and raising Texas's share of gas tax funds from 90.5 cents to 95 cents per dollar of gas tax revenues. He supported school vouchers, individual investment accounts as part of Social Security and colorblind standards nationally in college and university admissions. Kirk took an opposite stand on all these issues, but portrayed himself as a moderate Democrat who would often support Bush. Cornyn favored Bush-level spending on missile defense; Kirk did not. On Iraq, Kirk equivocated, taking different stands at different times.

Kirk was a favorite of Democratic contributors and spent much time--50 days, Cornyn's spokesman charged--outside Texas schmoozing with Democratic contributors in Washington, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, in Beverly Hills and similar venues. Republicans ran ads linking him to Hillary Rodham Clinton and liberal out-of-state moneygivers. Eventually he spent $8.9 million--almost as much as Cornyn's $9.5 million, most of it raised in Texas. Kirk was helped here by his sense of humor and a 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 in the course of the campaign Kirk 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 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, while Cornyn met with the deputy's widow. In San Antonio on September 12 he said that Cornyn might not support military action in Iraq if our 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 then said he backed Bush's position; 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." They hoped it would draw a large turnout of blacks and Hispanics. Democrats at one point they said they would register 500,000 new Hispanics, though they later scaled that back and concentrated on Election Day get-out-the-vote. Meanwhile Republicans quietly registered thousands of new voters in the heavily Republican fast-growing suburban counties around Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio and Austin. Polls showed the race close in the spring, with Cornyn well under 50%; one nonpartisan firm and Kirk's pollster showed Kirk ahead or leading in the summer and fall. 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 carried 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 otherwise black and Hispanic turnout does not seem to have risen much above that in 1994, the last big-turnout off-year election. In contrast, turnout was up from 25% to 52% in fast-growing counties around Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio and Austin. Cornyn holds the seat once held by Sam Houston, Lyndon B. Johnson and John Tower and is the first Texas senator to come from San Antonio, which in the state's first decades was its largest city and which he argues is the most representative.

In the Senate 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, which got less than 50 votes, to ban same-sex marriage. He insisted that he was acting not out of ill will but because of "the traditional institution of marriage and its importance as a stabilizing influence on our society." 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 co-sponsored the class action and bankruptcy bills opposed by trial lawyers but passed by the Senate and signed by Bush in 2005. He sought to amend the bankruptcy bill to require companies to file for bankruptcy in the state where their primary business or assets are located; this was a response to Enron's filing in New York, and Edward Kennedy, miffed that Massachusetts's Polaroid filed out of state, joined him. But Joseph Biden and Tom Carper of Delaware, legal home of 500,000 corporations, threatened to kill the bankruptcy bill, and Cornyn withdrew the amendment. Cornyn took a lead role in seeking to confirm Bush appellate judgeship appointees and urged colleagues to change the Senate rules to stop the Democrats' filibusters. He opposed demands for disclosure of documents after the Abu Ghraib abuses were discovered. He moved to strengthen the Freedom of Information Act with a bill that would penalize federal agencies and employees that fail to respond to requests in a timely manner; agencies would be deemed to waive any exemptions, except national security, personal privacy and proprietary business information, and would be required to discipline employees who fail to comply. It would require agencies to give requesters individualized tracking numbers and credible status reports.

Cornyn's hometown of San Antonio is only 150 miles from Mexico, and he has taken an interest in immigration and citizenship issues; in January 2005 he became chairman of the Immigration Subcommittee. (Its ranking Democrat, Edward Kennedy, floor managed his first bill, on immigration, in 1965.) 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 sponsored a bill to increase the time Mexicans with border crossing cards can remain in the United States from 72 hours to six months, the same time allowed for Canadians. And he proposed guest worker legislation, to allow workers with willing employers to get either seasonal visas (primarily farm workers) or nonseasonal visas for 12 months which could be extended to 36 months; some of their wages would be taken by the government and placed in bank accounts in their home countries, for their use when they return. This proposal was criticized by some who want to put guest workers on the path to citizenship and by others who argue that we should deport illegal aliens and not let guest workers in. Cornyn argues that it is unrealistic to expect that we will deport the estimated 8 to 10 million illegal aliens in the country and that people who want to work should be encouraged. He opposes military patrol of the border or building a fence along most of its length--these would disrupt life in South Texas, he argues--but backed the measure passed by the House in February 2005 that would allow completion of the 14-mile fence in San Diego despite the objections of the California Coastal Commission and that would bar driver's licenses for illegal aliens being recognized by airport screeners or federal building security agents. Cornyn argued that these security measures should be treated as part of a larger immigration bill, despite the contrary arguments of House Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner. But it is not clear whether he will be able to develop a consensus in the Senate on an issue on which tempers sometimes run hot and on which there are wide differences of opinion.

Committees

• Armed Services: Emerging Threats & Capabilities (Chmn.); Readiness & Management Support; Strategic Forces.
• Budget.
• Judiciary: Constitution, Civil Rights & Property Rights; Corrections & Rehabilitation; Immigration, Border Security & Citizenship (Chmn.); Intellectual Property; Terrorism, Technology & Homeland Security.
• Small Business & Entrepreneurship.
• Joint Economic Committee (6th of 10 Sens.).

Group Ratings (More Info)
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2004	5	11	0	17	100	74	100	100	95	100	--
2003	10	--	11	0	--	79	100	85	--	--	--

National Journal Ratings (More Info)
	2003 LIB	--	2003 CONS		2004 LIB	--	2004 CONS
Economic	0%	--	82%		5%	--	91%
Social	0%	--	59%		0%	--	84%
Foreign	0%	--	78%		33%	--	61%
For National Journal's complete 2004 Vote Ratings, as well as previous ratings dating back to 1995, please click here.

Key Votes Of The 108th Congress (More Info)
1. Ban Drilling in ANWR N 2. Approve Bush Tax Cuts Y 3. Medicare/Rx Bill Y 4. Bar Overtime Pay Regs. N 5. Energy Bill Y 6. Support Roe v. Wade N		7. Ban Partial-Birth Abortion Y  8. Assault Weapons Ban N  9. Ban Same-Sex Marriage Y 10. Ban Bunker-Buster Bomb N 11. Fund Iraq War Y 12. Restrict Missile Defense N

Election Results (More Info)
	Candidate	Total Votes	Percent	Expenditures
2002 general	John Cornyn (R)	2,496,243	55%	$9,769,780
	Ron Kirk (D)	1,955,758	43%	$9,426,763
	Other	62,011	1%
2002 primary	John Cornyn (R)	478,825	77%
	Bruce Lang (R)	46,907	8%
	Douglas Deffenbaugh (R)	43,611	7%
	Dudley Mooney (R)	32,262	5%
	Other	17,757	3%
1996 general	Phil Gramm (R)	3,027,680	55%	$14,078,131
	Victor M. Morales (D)	2,428,776	44%	$978,862