Reply #118: 10 Other Reasons Not to Like John Cornyn. [View All]

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10 Other Reasons Not to Like John Cornyn.

If you're as outraged as many folks are about Texas GOP Sen. John Cornyn, who made a statement on the Senate floor today that seemed to condone violence against judges, you may be wondering -- who the heck is this guy, and does he really believe this...stuff.

The short story is that the silver-haired, politician-from-central-casting Cornyn is a former Texas judge himself, who became the state's first-ever Republican attorney general in 1998 and parlayed that into winning the U.S. Senate seat vacated in 2002 by Phil Gramm. He's already a key player on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

But the devil is in the details. So here are 10 things that you need to know about John Cornyn.

1. The son of a U.S. Air Force officer, Cornyn attended the American School in Tokyo when his dad was stationed nearby, and in 1968 he was the loudest student voice in favor of racial demogogue George Wallace. He wrote in the student paper urging support for the man who'd stood in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama just five years earlier.

The young Cornyn's views, salvaged by classmate -- and future writer for The Nation -- Tim Shorrock:

"With the Supreme Court’s recent rulings and increased federal legislation, the government has become increasingly dictatorial and oppressive while the state and local governments have become more weak," he wrote. Here he is on law and order: "Mr. Wallace is convinced that no innocent man should be punished… many criminals never receive the punishment due them because they have clever lawyers, or the case takes so long to go through the slow court schedules and lengthy appeals cases." On the urban crisis: "The existence of poverty has been fact since the beginning of mankind. Statistics show us that it is not the poor element that riots and rebels, but others who hold complete disrespect for property and the rights of others (socialists?)" And, finally, on Vietnam: "It only seems reasonable that a cure (victory) for this Asian illness is most desirable even if the measures necessary are drastic."

2. Thirty-four years later, when Cornyn successfully ran for the Senate, two of his poll watchers were accused of voter intimidation in Hidalgo County, Texas, the heavily Hispanic area near the border. According to a Nov. 2, 2002, Associated Press story:

In McAllen, a voter reported Hopkins to an early voting supervisor for making a "racist remark." Hopkins is said to have joked, "I'm just a poll watcher but I don't see many Poles. I just see a lot of Mexicans."

In Edinburg, Mason was accused of "repeatedly talking to and harassing" voters, including an elderly woman who said she was "confronted." An early voting supervisor warned Mason and later removed her. When Mason came back to the polling place Friday, Navarro asked her to leave.

3. The use of the death penalty in Texas has been condemned by human rights groups around the world, but that's not how Cornyn sees it. This is what he told Bob Herbert in 2000:

The attorney general of Texas, John Cornyn, has said that Texas provides "super due process" to defendants in death penalty cases, and that the Texas way of administering capital punishment is "a model for the nation."

4. When Cornyn was Texas attorney general, his largest energy donor was the now-disgraced Enron Corp., whose PAC and executives forked over a whopping $193,000, according to a 2002 report by Texans for Public Justice. Some 60 percent of the funds came from CEO Kenneth Lay, now indicted for financial shenanigans related to Enron's fall. As AG, Cornyn would have represented the state in bankruptcy proceeding or other lawsuits.

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