John Cornyn is in Senate leadership, serving as the Republicans’ second-in-command during their years in the majority. Yet when it comes to exerting that power and delivering on the immigration issues he claims to care about, he conveniently never seems to make it happen.
We’ve been highlighting Cornyn’s obvious hypocrisy and weak excuses when it comes to his rhetorical support for DACA and Dreamers in a Spanish-language TV ad, noting Sen. Cornyn’s voting record against Dreamers and that actually using his influence to call for a vote on the pending “Dream and Promise Act” would offer proof of his supposed evolution on the issue.
But Cornyn’s failure to deliver on immigration goes much farther. Take the issue of family separation, one of the darkest chapters of this or any modern presidency. A damning new leaked report from the Department of Justice Inspector General highlights how White House officials, Cabinet Secretaries and senior staff throughout the Trump administration were complicit in the monstrous family separation policy that seized babies from their mothers’ arms.
While Cornyn expressed concern over the practice, note the way he manages to blame Democrats in his comments to Politico in 2018 – as if the apportionment of blame for family separation falls on their Democratic shoulders: “You can keep families intact and enforce the law … The solution is up to us, and if Democrats don’t want to work with us to solve the problem, shame on them. But we think we can come up with a reasonable way to solve the problem of family separation that is humane and compassionate.”
Despite his pivot to blame Democrats, throughout Trump’s attacks on immigrants, including separating families with no plan to reunite families, ending DACA, ending TPS, and diverting money away from military bases and families for the border wall – not to mention impeachment and COVID-19 responses – Sen. Cornyn just cannot take a moral stand. Rather, he has been a reliable ally of Mitch McConnell and President Trump, not an ally of Texans, immigrants or the American people.
The following is a statement from Mario Carrillo, the Texas-based Campaigns Manager for America’s Voice:
I’m not sure if it’s weakness, cowardice, or hypocrisy, but Senator John Cornyn never seems to use his supposed Senate power to actually deliver on the immigration issues he claims to support.
He likes to portray himself as powerful and independent, when his actual track record is one of following the party line, voting with Trump 95% of the time, and remaining complicit with the Trump immigration agenda.
If he wants to prove he supports Dreamers and a standalone bill, then he’s got an easy way to do so: by calling for a vote on the Dream and Promise Act that passed the House and is awaiting action in the Senate. And if he really cares about the plight of vulnerable children along the southern border, he would have done everything in his power to ensure that family separation not only stopped but that families would be reunited immediately.
