WASHINGTON — The Collin County Republican Party passed a resolution Monday to censure Sen. John Cornyn over actions the party believes run counter to the core principles of the Republican Party of Texas, including his work on recent federal gun violence legislation.
The Collin County GOP is the latest in a string of county parties to censure Cornyn since the senior Texas senator helped steer a bipartisan bill to address gun violence through Congress. In June, delegates at the Republican Party of Texas State Convention booed and jeered Cornyn as he explained the key components of the gun deal.
Abraham George, chairman of the Collin County GOP, said the resolution came primarily in light of the senator’s “recent work on red flag laws, and many other things that he’s opposed the Republican Caucus [on] in the Senate.”
“The censure calls for his immediate resignation, and also calls for the state party to take actions on it,” George said.
The censure resolution accuses Cornyn of “a pattern of action demonstrably opposed” to seven core state GOP party platform principles. It cites his votes to confirm presidential appointees and on congressional budget resolutions, among others, as evidence, in addition to his negotiations on the bipartisan gun law.
The @CollinGOP tonight nearly-unanimously adopted a Rule 44 resolution to censure @JohnCornyn for violating several of our party’s principles!
— Rohit Joy (@rohitjoycpa) August 2, 2022
Cornyn co-authored the bipartisan gun legislation, which President Joe Biden signed into law last month, and served as the lead Republican negotiator throughout the drafting process.
The law, largely regarded as the most significant legislation to curb gun violence in nearly 30 years, includes neither a federal red flag law nor a mandate for state laws, but does include money that can be used by states to enforce such laws. Texas does not have a red flag law.
The laws are intended to get guns out of the hands of individuals when officials find “red flags” indicating they could be a threat to themselves or others, but many Republicans and gun rights groups have blasted them as easily abused pathways for gun confiscation.
Cornyn is far from the first Texas Republican to face censure resolutions from conservative county parties — in 2020, a number of Texas county Republican parties censured Gov. Greg Abbott over his response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Joshua Blank, Director of Research for the Texas Politics Project, said that in terms of potential impacts at the ballot box, the Collin County censure doesn’t mean a whole lot right now.
Cornyn isn’t up for reelection until 2026, and for now, the censure isn’t a reflection of a broader movement developing outside of Collin County.
“The path that John Cornyn has blazed is one that’s led him to the cusp of basically being the Republican leader in the U.S. Senate, and that involves, in some ways, taking difficult positions on certain issues in order to show leadership within the Republican caucus in the Senate,” Blank said. “That doesn’t always play out very well in Texas.”
If the state Republican party, though, were to censure Cornyn, that would potentially be more of a problem for Cornyn, Blank said.
“I don’t think it would necessarily carry more weight with voters in any sort of real way, but what I think it does do is it gives the green light for primary challengers, and ammunition for primary challengers,” Blank said.
