81 Facts About John Cornyn

1.

John Cornyn III is an American politician, attorney, and former jurist serving as the senior United States senator from Texas, a seat he has held since 2002.

2.

John Cornyn was a judge on Texas's 37th District Court from 1985 to 1991.

3.

John Cornyn was elected an associate justice of the Texas Supreme Court, where he served from 1991 to 1997.

4.

In 1998, John Cornyn was elected Attorney General of Texas, serving one term before winning a seat in the US Senate in 2002.

5.

John Cornyn attended the American School in Japan after his family moved to Tokyo in 1968, and graduated from it in 1969.

6.

John Cornyn earned a Juris Doctor from St Mary's University School of Law in 1977 and an LL.

7.

John Cornyn was named the St Mary's Distinguished Law School Graduate in 1994, and a Trinity University Distinguished Alumnus in 2001.

8.

In 1988, John Cornyn attended a two-week seminar at Oxford University, jointly hosted by the National Judicial College at the University of Nevada, Reno and Florida State University's College of Law.

9.

John Cornyn served as a district judge in San Antonio for six years before being elected as a Republican in 1990 to the Texas Supreme Court, on which he served for seven years.

10.

In September 2000, John Cornyn created the Texas Internet Bureau to investigate illegal internet practices.

11.

John Cornyn was criticized by civil rights groups for failing to investigate in a timely manner the false drug convictions of numerous African Americans in Tulia, Texas.

12.

On September 6,2002, The Austin Chronicle reported that John Cornyn had announced that his office would investigate the 1999 drug bust, where the testimony of one narcotics agent led to the arrests of 46 people, 43 of whom were Black.

13.

In 2005, John Cornyn was mentioned as a possible replacement for Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and William Rehnquist.

14.

John Cornyn defeated his closest Republican challenger, the self-financed, Dallas-based international physician Bruce Rusty Lang, by a ten-to-one margin.

15.

John Cornyn was reelected to a fourth term in 2020 in the closest of his Senate campaigns.

16.

In 2004, John Cornyn co-founded and became the co-chairman of the US Senate India Caucus.

17.

In 2005, John Cornyn gained notice by connecting the Supreme Court's reluctance to hear arguments for sustaining Terri Schiavo's life with the recent murders of Judge Joan Lefkow's husband and mother, as well as the courtroom murder of Judge Rowland Barnes.

18.

John Cornyn later said that the statement was taken out of context, and for that reason, he regretted the statement.

19.

John Cornyn advocated for Coleman to bring the case before the federal court, and said the trial and appeals could take years to complete.

20.

John Cornyn threatened that Republicans would wage a "World War III" if Senate Democrats had attempted to seat Democratic candidate Al Franken before the appeals were complete.

21.

In September 2005, during Roberts's Supreme Court hearings, John Cornyn's staff passed out bingo cards to reporters.

22.

John Cornyn asked them to stamp their card every time a Democrat on the Judiciary Committee used terms such as "far right" or "extremist".

23.

On July 24,2009, John Cornyn announced his intention to vote against President Obama's Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, saying that she might rule "from a liberal, activist perspective".

24.

On March 18,2020, John Cornyn blamed the COVID-19 pandemic on cultural practices in China and mistakenly blamed China for the MERS and swine flu epidemics.

25.

John Cornyn's comments were criticized by some Democrats and the National Council of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

26.

On November 14,2012, John Cornyn was elected Senate Minority Whip by his peers.

27.

John Cornyn was named Senate Majority Whip after the 2014 election, in which Republicans gained a Senate majority.

28.

John Cornyn said that no serious candidate would accept a nomination knowing that they would not be confirmed.

29.

When Obama nominated Merrick Garland to replace Scalia, John Cornyn said that even if the president has the constitutional authority to nominate someone, the Senate has full authority on how to proceed.

30.

John Cornyn said that the voice of the people should play a role, and that the "only way to empower the American people" was having the vacancy be filled by the winner of the upcoming presidential election, so no hearings on Garland should be held.

31.

In September 2020, John Cornyn supported a vote on Trump's nominee to fill the Supreme Court vacancy caused by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

32.

On June 8,2017, during a committee hearing whose announced topic was the Russian interference in the 2016 election and Comey's dismissal as FBI director, John Cornyn opted instead to spend his time questioning James Comey on Hillary Clinton's email controversy.

33.

In September 2018, during the Supreme Court nomination hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, Cornyn accused the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee of devolving into mob rule by breaking the rules of decorum when asking for postponement or adjournment of the hearing to obtain or review documents from Kavanaugh's time working for the George W Bush administration.

34.

John Cornyn said that it was hard to believe the Democrats' claim that they could not properly assess Kavanaugh without the documents because it seemed that their minds were already made up.

35.

In 2007, John Cornyn voted against expanding federal funding for stem cell research that utilized human embryonic stem cells.

36.

In 2019, when asked about an Alabama law that prohibited abortions, John Cornyn said it was an "Alabama state issue".

37.

John Cornyn sponsored a bill to allow law enforcement to force anyone arrested or detained by federal authorities to provide samples of their DNA, which would be recorded in a central database.

38.

John Cornyn voted to recommend a constitutional ban on flag desecration and for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman.

39.

John Cornyn voted for the reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act and extending its wiretap provision.

40.

John Cornyn continued in another tweet, "Thank goodness some SCOTUS precedents are overruled"; Brown had overturned more than 50 years of precedent regarding the doctrine of "separate but equal" as defined by Plessy.

41.

John Cornyn frequently praised Trump during most of his presidential term.

42.

John Cornyn said that he praised Trump in public but expressed disagreement with him in private.

43.

John Cornyn repeatedly defended Trump's decision to siphon resources from the Pentagon in order to build a wall on the Mexico border.

44.

John Cornyn urged Trump to restart trade talks on the Trans Pacific Partnership, which Trump called "a disaster".

45.

In June 2020, amid reports that Russia had paid the Taliban bounties to kill American soldiers and that Trump had been briefed on the subject months earlier, John Cornyn defended an assertion by Trump that he had never been briefed on the subject.

46.

On May 28,2021, John Cornyn voted against creating an independent commission to investigate the January 6 United States Capitol attack.

47.

In December 2010, John Cornyn was one of 26 senators to vote against the ratification of New Start, a nuclear arms reduction treaty between the United States and Russia that obliges both countries to have no more than 1,550 strategic warheads and 700 launchers deployed during the next seven years, and provides a continuation of on-site inspections that halted when START I expired the previous year.

48.

In 2013, John Cornyn said that, despite the sequester, the Pentagon would actually see its budget increase.

49.

John Cornyn supported US involvement in the Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen.

50.

John Cornyn supported the Senate resolution, expressing objection to the UN Security Council Resolution 2334, which called Israeli settlement building in the occupied Palestinian territories a flagrant violation of international law.

51.

John Cornyn has been a vocal critic of the People's Republic of China.

52.

John Cornyn heightened his anti-China advocacy during the COVID-19 pandemic and the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

53.

John Cornyn has since deleted the inaccurate tweet and refused to respond to queries about it.

54.

John Cornyn voted to permanently repeal the estate tax and raise the estate tax exemption to $5 million.

55.

John Cornyn voted in favor of $350 billion in tax cuts over 11 years and supported making the George W Bush tax cuts permanent.

56.

John Cornyn voted for the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 but against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009.

57.

In 2008, John Cornyn voted for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, known as the Wall Street bailout, and later voted to end the program.

58.

John Cornyn voted against a measure recognizing that climate change is manmade.

59.

John Cornyn was one of 22 senators to sign a letter to Trump urging him to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement.

60.

In May 2019, John Cornyn said it was important that the United States take measures to combat climate change, but condemned the Green New Deal as proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

61.

In 2005, John Cornyn voted against including oil and gas smokestacks in mercury regulations.

62.

John Cornyn voted against factoring global warming into federal project planning, and against banning drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

63.

John Cornyn voted against removing oil and gas exploration subsidies.

64.

John Cornyn voted against it in 2009, and played a leading role in the attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017.

65.

John Cornyn voted against the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010.

66.

In January 2014, John Cornyn introduced the "Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act".

67.

John Cornyn continued to support Concealed Carry Reciprocity as of 2018, with the Republican-held House of Representatives passing a bill in late 2017 with this language attached to gun control measures from the Senate's Fix NICS bill.

68.

In 2017, John Cornyn helped Democrats pass legislation designed to aid federal agencies in alerting, reporting and recording gun purchases by creating a universal cross-agency database.

69.

In 2022, in the wake of the Robb Elementary School shooting, John Cornyn opposed further background check laws and those limiting the types of weapons that adults may purchase.

70.

John Cornyn later became one of ten Republican senators to support a bipartisan agreement on gun control, which included a red flag provision, support for state crisis intervention orders, funding for school safety resources, stronger background checks for buyers under 21, and penalties for straw purchases.

71.

When running for the Senate in 2002, John Cornyn defended the law.

72.

John Cornyn said he worried that the Supreme Court would next overturn the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibited recognition of same-sex marriage at the federal level, and subsequently played a leading role in trying to introduce a constitutional amendment to prohibit same-sex marriage.

73.

John Cornyn argued that recognition of same-sex marriage harmed those who were in heterosexual marriages.

74.

John Cornyn claimed that children raised by gay couples are "at higher risk of a host of social ills", such as crime, drug use and dropping out of school, arguing that same-sex would put "more and more children at risk through a radical social experiment".

75.

In 2012, when President Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage, John Cornyn criticized Obama and accused him of trying to "divide the country".

76.

In 2021, when President Joe Biden reversed Trump's ban on transgender troops serving in the military, John Cornyn accused Biden of dividing the country.

77.

In 2022, at the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Ketanji Brown Jackson, John Cornyn expressed his position that state governments ought to have the power to ban same-sex marriage.

78.

John Cornyn opposes profiting from memorabilia tied to convicted murderers, and has made several unsuccessful attempts to pass laws against it.

79.

In 2021, John Cornyn helped Senate Republicans filibuster national election reform legislation.

80.

John Cornyn opposes the removal of statues relating to the Confederate States of America.

81.

John Cornyn receives pensions from three separate state and local governments in addition to his Senate salary.