Opinion | China Cooks the Carbon Emissions Books
Beijing redefines a key metric to make itself look greener.
Will we remain the party of conservative principles or embrace progressivism in the guise of populism?
Beijing redefines a key metric to make itself look greener.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton wins the GOP Senate runoff after President Trump's endorsement, setting up a contested race against James Talarico.
Ken Paxton's Texas primary victory puts another Republican Senate seat in play, alongside those of North Carolina, Maine, Ohio, and Alaska.
The former British prime minister’s criticisms of Labour Party policy suffer from a lack of self-reflection.
Washington Examiner columnist Joe Concha said, “This is not the Republican Party, it’s the MAGA party,” arguing that President Donald Trump’s continued success in Republican primaries demonstrates the extent to which the GOP has become aligned with the MAGA movement. Concha highlighted Trump’s success rate in backing Republican candidates and pointed to recent defeats suffered by […]
Republicans are growing increasingly “uncomfortable” as a confluence of factors have “scrambled the political math in typically red Texas,” Axios reported Sunday, factors that could potentially flip a seat that has been held by a Republican since 1994.Among the strongest factors is Texas’ demographic shift, with more than 2.5 million Americans having moved to the Lone Star State since 2020. Texas’ new residents, political science professor Brandon Rottinghaus told Axios, are also “less tied to Texas’ long-standing political patterns,” the outlet reported, giving Democrats a greater chance at flipping the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who was defeated in the GOP primary last week by the state’s attorney general Ken Paxton.Political science Professor Mark P. Jones supported Rottinghaus’ theory as well, telling Axios that Texas’ new residents are typically either “economic migrants” or “political refugees" – or both.Another major concern for Republicans is Texas’ Hispanic population, now the state’s largest demographic group. Hispanic voters were a significant factor in President Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory, but recent polls have suggested that Hispanic voters were abandoning Trump in droves, a dynamic that could bode poorly for the Trump-endorsed Paxton in November.Trump won 55% of Hispanic Texas voters in 2024 according to exit polls, but as of last week, the president’s disapproval among the group has soared to 67%.“Paxton carries years of legal and ethical baggage, but [Democratic Senate nominee James] Talarico also has vulnerabilities in a state that still leans conservative, including past comments on religion and his progressive profile Republicans will target,” wrote Axios’ Russell Contreras.“Texas isn't suddenly blue. But it is bigger, newer and less predictable – and that's enough to make Paxton's Senate race uncomfortable for Republicans.”
'If this is the price of an endorsement, I will never pay it'
The Texas senator was emblematic of the era between Reagan and Trump, as Republicans shifted from the party of business to a cult of personalityThe defeat of John Cornyn is a milestone in the downfall of the Republican party. His virtue for decades as a “steady conservative institutionalist”, as the New York Times described him, became his terminal liability. His expenditure of $92m, the greatest amount ever dropped by a candidate in a Senate primary, could not forestall his humiliation at the hands of the scoundrel Ken Paxton, with his lengthy rap sheet of allegations of bribery, abuse of office, felony securities fraud and impeachment by the Republican-controlled Texas House, along with his hostile divorce by his wife on “biblical grounds”. Despite Cornyn’s blast of TV ads against “Crooked Ken”, the “Home Wrecker”, Paxton, carrying the imprimatur of Donald Trump, trounced him by 28 points. Immediately after the primary, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which Cornyn had once led, set about scrubbing the ads as if there had been no Cornyn campaign at all and the villainous Paxton was the rightful successor to hold the Senate seat Cornyn had occupied for 24 years. The Orwellian erasure was a further measure of the relentless Trump effort to stamp out of existence the remnants of the old party and to build on its ashes his golden idol.Cornyn’s ignominious rejection is not his alone. His loss represents the ongoing shattering of the Republican party whose foundations were laid by Ronald Reagan, laboriously built in Texas by the Bushes, both father and son, with their operative Karl Rove, and, within the Senate, where Cornyn arrived in 2002, the ruling Republican structure established by Mitch McConnell. Cornyn rode on the Reagan wave that swept aside Democrats in Texas, to be raised up as a factotum of the Bush operation, and serve as the indispensable conduit of funds from the oil and gas industry to fuel McConnell’s dark money machine that financed Republican candidates, destroyed campaign finance reform, and secured the conservative majority on the supreme court.Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist Continue reading...