Virulently anti-LGBTQ+ Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton plans to challenge U.S. Sen. John Cornyn in next year’s Republican Senate primary.
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“It’s official. I’m running for U.S. Senate to fight for President Trump’s agenda and take a sledgehammer to the D.C. establishment,” Paxton wrote Tuesday on X (formerly Twitter). “Together, let’s send John Cornyn packing.”
He shared a video of him making the announcement on Laura Ingraham’s show, The Ingraham Angle, on the Fox News Channel. “It’s definitely time for a change in Texas,” Paxton told Ingraham. “We have another great U.S. senator in Ted Cruz. And it’s time we have another great senator that will actually stand up and fight for Republican values, fight for the values of the people of Texas, and also support Donald Trump.”
Cornyn, who was first elected to the Senate in 2002, is a staunch conservative with an anti-LGBTQ+ record — mostly zeroes on the Human Rights Campaign’s Congressional Scorecard — but he has occasionally been willing to criticize Trump. For instance, he voted to acquit Trump in his second impeachment trial, which turned on a charge of inciting the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, but he did release a statement saying, “This trial reminded us that too many public officials, including the President, have used reckless and incendiary speech.” Cornyn expressed doubt that Trump was the right Republican presidential nominee in 2024, although he ended up endorsing him.
Still, Cornyn voted with Trump 92 percent of the time in the first Trump term and backed all of his appointees. He has also voted to confirm all the appointees in the second Trump presidency, “including controversial picks who attracted skepticism from GOP lawmakers,” as The Texas Tribune notes. However, Cornyn is seen as an establishment Republican, Paxton as MAGA.
If Cornyn’s record is mostly anti-LGBTQ+, Paxton’s is intensely so. He authored the legal opinion that allowing transgender children to receive gender-affirming care is child abuse, calling for Texas child protective services to investigate parents who let their kids undergo this care. Gov. Greg Abbott agreed, but the investigations have been blocked in court.
Paxton has been seeking records from out-of-state hospitals to see if Texas children are receiving gender-affirming care there, and he recently told Texas agencies to ignore court orders directing them to allow nonbinary gender markers in official documents. He further recommended that agencies retroactively alter driver’s licenses, birth certificates, and similar documents to reflect a person’s sex assigned at birth.
In 2022, he said that if Texas reinstates its anti-sodomy law — struck down with other states’ similar laws in the Supreme Court’s Lawrence v. Texas decision in 2003 — he would be “willing and able” to defend it. This comment came after the high court overturned Roe v. Wade, that year and archconservative Justice Clarence Thomas said he’d like to overturn other landmark decisions, including Lawrence and the Obergefell v. Hodgesmarriage equality ruling, if a case came to the court.
Like Trump, Paxton has been impeached but acquitted. He was accused of crimes that included bribery while trying to help a friend and campaign donor, but the Texas Senate acquitted him in 2023. He also was under FBI investigation for securities fraud for years, but toward the end of Joe Biden’s presidency, the U.S. Department of Justice decided not to prosecute him because of doubts about whether he could be convicted, something reported for the first time by the Associated Press this month. He reached a settlement in a state securities fraud case against him.
His challenge to Cornyn sets up a potentially expensive race for the Republicans. Wesley Hunt, a U.S. representative from Texas, is also considering a run in the Senate Republican primary.
“All that has added up to one overriding fear: that a Texas Senate GOP primary could end up costing their party at least $100 million, siphoning money from other critical battlegrounds, according to several Senate GOP sources,” CNN notes. “Plus, they worry that a wounded GOP nominee could end up giving Democrats a chance in what would otherwise be a long-shot pickup opportunity as former Rep. Colin Allred weighs another Senate run.”
Allred lost to Republican incumbent Cruz by 8 percentage points last year but won a bigger share of the vote than Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris across multiple populations in Texas.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune has endorsed Cornyn for reelection. All the Texas Republican Senate hopefuls are seeking Trump’s endorsement.
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