Free Republic

President Trump allowed the deadline for candidates to drop out to pass Tuesday without making an endorsement in the hotly contested Republican Texas Senate primary runoff race. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is taking on incumbent Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) in the May 26 runoff, after neither candidate received 50% of the vote in the primary earlier this month. Trump had previously said he would ask whichever candidate did not receive his endorsement to drop out of the race. Paxton has said he would be willing to drop out if Senate Republicans agreed to roll back the filibuster and pass...

A senior staff member for Sen. John Cornyn’s (R-TX) reelection campaign has a history of raging against Breitbart News and President Donald Trump while aligning with radical leftists. Matt Mackowiak, who serves as the communications director for Cornyn’s campaign, once demanded advertisers drop Breitbart News and said the outlet should be “defrocked” from the conservative movement, tweets unearthed by The National Pulse reveal. “It’s time to defrock Breitbart from the conservative movement. Treat them like Infowars. Pressure their advertisers. Ignore them,” Mackowiak wrote in a post to X in 2016.

A super PAC backing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) for Senate is airing television ads in Palm Beach, Fla., where President Trump is spending the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago resort, as his endorsement in a competitive primary runoff hangs in the balance. Lone Star Liberty PAC came out with a new television ad on Friday that accuses Paxton’s opponent, Rep. John Cornyn (R-Texas), of having “betrayed” Trump, citing his votes to confirm Merrick Garland as U.S. attorney general and Lisa Monaco as deputy attorney general in 2021. “John Cornyn betrayed President Trump, and he doesn’t deserve our trust” the...

The scenario long-dreaded by Republican strategists looks increasingly plausible following Tuesday’s primary election in Texas: Democrat James Talarico may face Republican Ken Paxton for the state’s U.S. Senate seat in November. Paxton is heading for a runoff against Sen. John Cornyn where he is likely to be at least a slight favorite, though the final results from the first round of voting could shift expectations. Talarico defeated Rep. Jasmine Crockett in the Democratic primary, according to Associated Press projections. Republicans fear the matchup could, at the very least, cost the party tens of millions of dollars to protect Paxton, the...

Senate Republicans know that Trump-backed voter ID legislation is doomed to fail and are trying to find a way to pin the blame on Senate Democrats. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., plans to bring the bill to the floor next week, but Republicans won’t take the route of launching into a talking filibuster despite pressure from President Donald Trump and the GOP base to do so. "We don't have the votes either to proceed, get on a talking filibuster, nor to sustain one if we got on it," Thune said. "But that is just a function of math, and...

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, reversed himself on the Senate filibuster Wednesday after years of unflinching support for the 60-vote threshold to pass most bills. Now, locked in a competitive Republican runoff for his Senate seat and eyeing President Donald Trump's endorsement, Cornyn says he'll support "whatever changes to Senate rules that may prove necessary" to pass the SAVE America Act, a sweeping election overhaul bill that Trump has called his No. 1 priority. Cornyn's comments are part of an op-ed he wrote in the New York Post published Wednesday, titled: "Why the SAVE Act matters more than the filibuster." The...

Sen. John Cornyn threw his support behind scrapping the filibuster to pass a voting restrictions bill President Donald Trump has called his “No. 1 priority” in Congress, as the Texas Republican continues to seek the president’s endorsement and stave off a bruising primary runoff election. Trump has held off on endorsing Cornyn, the pick of top Senate Republicans, over Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in a bid to pressure leadership to lower the threshold of votes needed to pass the SAVE America Act, which would enact citizenship and photo ID restrictions in elections while also targeting transgender rights. Paxton has...

Some of the first polling of the general election race for U.S. Senate in Texas showed that the Democratic candidate has the lead over both Republicans vying for the seat. Texas state Rep. James Talarico won the Democratic Party’s nomination during last week’s primary. However, the Republicans running for the office – incumbent Sen. John Cornyn and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton – are preparing for a May runoff after neither of them cracked the 50% threshold during the primary. The poll was conducted by Public Policy Polling between March 4 and 5 and asked respondents questions ranging from the...

Just got a call from a Senate staffer. GOP leadership can't allow the disclosure of sex harassment settlements right now. The reason? It would harm John Cornyn. I'm told: that particular settlement was paid to another man.

One of the reasons Thune, McConnell, etc. want to protect Cornyn and get him reelected is so they can pass the Senate Judiciary gavel to him. So they can continue to thwart conservatism and prevent conservatives in executive legal positions. Grassley has been thwarting US attorney nominees with the blue slip nonsense, Tillis stopped Ed Martin and had to be dragged kicking and screaming to support Bondi. Cornyn gone from the committee opens up Mike Lee as chair. With both Cornyn and Tillis gone, and Grassley almost dead, Lindsay Graham will be the only pantywaist left. Cornyn MUST be defeated...

@SaraGonzalesTX Mr. President @realDonaldTrump, I am one of your biggest supporters and I am urging you as someone who is in the Texas grassroots: do NOT endorse Cornyn. It will be one of your biggest mistakes. The majority of Texas voters voted AGAINST Cornyn last night. We don’t want him!

U.S. Sen. John Cornyn said Thursday that Republicans need to find an alternative to former President Donald Trump for the 2024 presidential election, saying the party needs "a candidate who can actually win." "I think President Trump’s time has passed him by," Cornyn said when asked about the 2024 Republican presidential primary, which is still taking shape. "I don’t think President Trump understands that when you run in a general election, you have to appeal to voters beyond your base."

Senate Majority Leader John Thune urged President Donald Trump on Wednesday to deliver a swift endorsement of Texas Sen. John Cornyn to potentially forestall what is widely expected to be an expensive and nasty primary runoff against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Thune told reporters he hasn’t yet spoken to Trump since the election returns from Tuesday’s primary came in but indicated he intends to personally redouble his efforts, saying Wednesday that “hopefully” the president will give Cornyn his influential nod. “[If] Trump endorses early, it saves everybody a lot of money, and … 10 weeks of a spirited campaign...

The general election is Nov. 3; Early voting for the general election is scheduled for Oct. 19 through Oct. 30.Jasmine Crockett took the stage at her Election Night party to talk about the Texas Supreme Court’s decision to suspend an earlier ruling to extend voting in Dallas County. With nearly 35% of the state vote tallied so far, Texas Rep. James Talarico is leading U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett by nearly five points. The Democratic race for the Senate nomination had only three candidates: Crockett, Talarico, and Ahmed R. Hassan. With 34% of the vote counted, Talarico has nearly 52%...

The competitive Republican primary for Senate in Texas is headed to a runoff, according to a Decision Desk HQ projection. The race will head to a May 26 showdown between incumbent Sen. John Cornyn and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton as Republicans scramble to keep the seat in GOP hands. Neither Cornyn nor Paxton won the 50 percent-plus-one support they needed to avoid a runoff against a third competitor, Rep. Wesley Hunt, who was pulling in double-digit support in polls ahead of the race. Polls had also shown Paxton with a slight lead. The upcoming runoff will pit the four-term...

MAGA Texas Attorney General is expected to win the Texas Republican Senate primary today according to the Polymarket Poll. Paxton, a staunch conservative and MAGA favorite is leading in the Polymarket Poll over RINO John Cornyn by 60 Points! Paxton is well known for fighting election fraud in the state of Texas. Ken Paxton also filed the lawsuit in 2020 contesting the election in four states where Biden reportedly defeated President Trump with mysterious late-night ballot drops. 126 US representatives supported Paxton’s case. 23 states joined Paxton and Texas in the lawsuit.

Sen. John Cornyn claimed in his final pitch to voters that his opponent Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was pursuing a “vanity project” in the Senate Republican primary that would doom Republicans down ballot in the midterms — and risk a third impeachment of President Trump. Cornyn (R-Texas) spoke to supporters at a civic center outside San Antonio on Monday — the day before the Texas primary elections — urging the GOP to avoid a “complacency” that would allow Democrats to reclaim a statewide office in Congress for the first time since 1994. “Ken Paxton is engaged in a vanity...

Republican officials and candidates in Texas have shifted their rhetorical attack lines from the border fears that dominated recent elections to the state’s growing Muslim population, with language that echoes the aftermath of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric has unnerved many in the state’s Islamic community while sending signals to Republicans outside Texas who might be searching for rhetorical targets now that the nation’s southwestern border has grown quiet. Ads for Senator John Cornyn of Texas have touted his fight against “radical Islam.” Texas Republican lawmakers created a “Sharia-Free America Caucus” in Congress....

The House this week is set to take up the SAVE America Act (the SAVE Act 2.0), an election-integrity measure that some Senate Republicans can’t seem to get behind even though the vast majority of Americans already have. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise’s office confirms the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of U.S. citizenship to register and photo identification to vote in federal elections, will hit the floor on Tuesday. While Democrats will spend hours making a mockery of truth and reality in opposing it, the legislation is expected to pass mostly along party lines — as the...

Republican candidates are beating Democratic counterparts in the Texas U.S. Senate race regardless of who de candidates are, according to a new poll. The survey, conducted by the University of Houston's Hobby School of Public Affairs, showed that Republicans John Cornyn and Ken Paxton would beat their Democratic counterparts Jasmine Crockett and James Talarico regardless of the matchup.