It’s become abundantly clear that U.S. Senator John Cornyn has no intention of distancing himself from Donald Trump, the man who will forever be immortalized in American history books as the third president to be impeached.
Cornyn has proved to be an immutable Trump ally throughout the president’s first term in the White House, but the senior senator from Texas extended that allegiance when he eagerly took on the role of a top Trump surrogate during impeachment proceedings. When the House’s hearings got underway in December, Cornyn insisted that the inquiry—which centered on Trump’s ham-handed plot to leverage military aid to Ukraine for political dirt—was a farce. As far back as October, at a time when Trump was even more embattled than usual, Cornyn made it clear that, come what may, he and his GOP colleagues wouldn’t budge. “Republicans, I don’t believe, think it’s in their long-term policy interest to divide the party in order to elect Democrats,” Cornyn told reporters. “That’s what I think the calculation is.” He even said he wouldn’t bother to watch or read any of the House testimony. “I’m just not going to—I do not approve,” he declared.
It’s worth remembering that Cornyn is no legal rube—he is a former Texas Supreme Court justice and state attorney general—but that hasn’t kept him from deploying a cynically partisan defense of the president. When the House voted before Christmas to impeach the president for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, initiating what was supposed to be an impartial Senate trial, Cornyn blasted out an email pledging to “wrap up this sham impeachment with an acquittal.” He willingly trotted out the party line that Trump had been impeached for a “non-crime over events that never occurred.”
