John Cornyn III (/ˈkɔːrnɪn/ KOR-nin; born February 2, 1952) is an American politician, attorney, and former jurist serving as the senior United States senator from Texas, a seat he has held since 2002.

[16] The Internet Bureau was funded through an $800,000 grant from Governor Bush’s office, and its mission was to "help fight cybercrime in Texas, including consumer fraud, hacker break-ins, and online child exploitation".

[18] 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.

On September 6, 2002, The Austin Chronicle reported that 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.

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

[23] Texas Representative Rick Noriega won the March 4 Democratic primary against Gene Kelly, Ray McMurrey, and Rhett Smith.

"[34] As chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Cornyn was a strong supporter of Norm Coleman's various court challenges to the 2008 election certification of the Minnesota U.S. Senate race.

[39] On July 24, 2009, 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".

[26][47] After the death of Associate Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016, Cornyn said that anyone Obama nominated to replace him would have a difficult confirmation process and feel like a piñata.

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

[51] 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.

[62][63][64] Cornyn instead pushed for "several alternatives that would use adult and cord blood stem cells for research [as those] methods have proven to be more productive, and they do not harm or destroy human embryos.

[67] In the 2004 debate surrounding the Federal Marriage Amendment, Cornyn released an advance copy of a speech he was to give at The Heritage Foundation.

According to his office, he removed the reference to the box turtle in the actual speech,[68] but The Washington Post ran the quote, as did The Daily Show.

[69][70] 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.

[citation needed] In a February 24, 2019, tweet, Cornyn mocked dictatorship, centralized power and democratic socialism by quoting Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini as saying "We were the first to assert that the more complicated the forms assumed by civilization, the more restricted the freedom of the individual must become.

But in the weeks before his reelection campaign, amid a tightening race with Democratic nominee MJ Hegar, Cornyn began to distance himself from Trump.

[78][79][80][81] Cornyn repeatedly defended Trump's decision to siphon resources from the Pentagon in order to build a wall on the Mexico border.

[82] Cornyn warned Trump about anticipated negative effects of restructuring tariffs on Mexican exports, saying, "We're holding a gun to our own heads by doing this.

"[83] In January 2018, he was one of 36 Republican senators to sign a letter to Trump requesting that he preserve the North American Free Trade Agreement by modernizing it for the 21st-century economy.

In August 2018, Cornyn urged the Trump administration to impose sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Act against Chinese officials responsible for human rights abuses against the Uyghur Muslim minority in western China's Xinjiang region.

[99][100] In a Washington Post opinion piece, Cornyn wrote that widespread adoption of Huawei technology could increase vulnerability to cyberattacks and endanger NATO troops engaged on 5G-equipped battlefields.

He has been widely accused of spreading the misinformation that MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome, a disease first reported from the Arabian Peninsula) and the Swine Flu (an epidemic that first emerged in North America) originated from China, because allegedly "people eat bats and snakes and dogs and things like that.

"[102] In addition to charges of racism, a Washington Post article has noted that "none of the diseases he mentioned are linked to dogs and snakes" and that rattlesnake-eating is not popular in China, but is in Cornyn's own Texas.

[109] In May 2019, 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.

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

[117] Cornyn said that Senator Ted Cruz's 2013 efforts to defund the Affordable Care Act by threatening to default on the U.S. government's debt obligations were "unachievable", adding, "the shutdown did not help our cause.

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

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

[142][143] In 2022, at the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Ketanji Brown Jackson, Cornyn expressed his position that state governments ought to have the power to ban same-sex marriage.