Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) has an imaginary friend—and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee wants everyone to know it.
A few weeks ago, Cornyn tweeted about a “friend” of his who said that “300 ppl” were coming across his property every night:
Friend on border sez 300 ppl coming across his property every night.And Napolitano sez border is under control?
— JohnCornyn (@JohnCornyn) February 21, 2013
Which sounds a little extreme. Three hundred crossings per night is 109,500 crossings a year, which is a lot of people on a single property considering that US Customs and Border Protection stopped about 365,000 people from crossing into the US in 2012 over the entire border (nearly 2,000 miles long). A single property that saw so many breaches would be a serious threat to border security. Yet when the Dallas Morning News asked Cornyn to identify the friend, the property in question, or any other kind of backup evidence, he declined.
This week, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is going after Cornyn for his over-the-top border claim, sending a press email to news outlets asking, “Who’s Your Mysterious ‘Friend’, John Cornyn?”
As DSCC spokesman Justin Barasky said:
It’s time for John Cornyn to stop ducking and dodging reporters’ questions and verify the truthfulness of his claim. John Cornyn’s continued refusal to reveal his source amounts to an admission that this was nothing more than his latest effort to endear himself to the far right and Ted Cruz in particular, who is beginning to look more and more like the senior Senator from the state of Texas. John Cornyn either owes Texans an explanation, or needs to admit that he’s simply making stuff up.
(And calling Ted Cruz the senior Senator from the state of Texas is saying a lot! Ted Cruz is the guy who earned himself a New York Times profile for his dogged refusal to compromise and his McCarthyish charge that Chuck Hagel is a Communist.)
The DSCC also called Cornyn’s still-unsubstantiated claim a “never ending effort to endear himself to the most extreme elements of his party.” Such patterns of behavior are why we regularly refer to Senator Cornyn as the “Biggest Hypocrite in Immigration Reform,” an award we first awarded him in 2011 but still remains topical today. Cornyn, again and again, blows smoke about why the nation needs to pass immigration reform—and then does everything he can to stonewall and shoot down legislation.
That’s because Cornyn is struggling to straddle two sides of a divide in Texas at a time when the state’s demographics are rapidly changing. Latino voters in Texas have grown 63% since 2000 and are the single greatest reason why Texas gained four House seats in the last census. Texas Latinos broke for Obama over Romney by a 70-29% margin in the last election. Rapid Latino vote growth in the state makes it a question of when, not if, Texas will turn blue—prognosticators estimate it could happen as soon as 2016 or 2020. Yet Cornyn still feels the need to kowtow to anti-immigrant Tea Partiers who vote in primaries, hence his talk-but-not-walk approach to immigration reform. And apparently now, his unreasonable lies.
