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Cornyn flattened in 28-point Texas wipeout; Squad collapses across Illinois primaries; DHS memo puts asylum-fraud lawyers in ICE’s crosshairs; the political class learns who holds the cards; more.
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Good morning, C&C family, it’s Wednesday! Your midweek roundup includes: Your Wednesday roundup includes: how Texas Republican voters incinerated 24-year incumbent John Cornyn — beating him 64 to 36 despite the national GOP outspending his challenger ten-to-one — and elevated pandemic-era courtroom brawler Ken Paxton into the general election against Cornyn’s empty Senate seat; why the Squad just got methodically swept out of five Illinois Democrat congressional primaries in what Axios solemnly diagnosed as a “virtually total collapse,” executed not by an outraged centrist uprising but by their own party leadership quietly cutting them loose; how a new DHS memo finally puts the activist lawyers — including the Big Law pro bono operations billing $1,200 an hour to coach fraudulent claims — squarely in the prosecutorial crosshairs after asylum applications mysteriously ballooned from 19,000 in 2012 to 3.18 million in 2024; and why all three stories trace the same arc — incumbents, ideologues, and immigration lawyers learning the same lesson at the same time, namely that the voters of 2026 are no longer willing to mistake being in office for DOING THE JOB.
🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍
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If there is one thing we know about Texas, besides the fact that you can fit three entire European nations inside a single ranching estate and still have room for a Buc-ee’s, it is that Texas politics does not do “subtle.” When Texas politicians fight, they do not exchange polite letters or calmly disagree on the Senate floor. They engage in the political equivalent of a monster truck rally, complete with flying mud, deafening engines roaring, and at least one guy getting flattened by an oversized vehicle named The Grave Digger. This morning, the New York Times topped its webpage with the report, “Ken Paxton Ousts John Cornyn, Solidifying Trump’s Grip on Republican Party Voters”
Which brings us to the recent Republican primary for the United States Senate, a race that the New York Times —which views Texas in the alarmed manner normal people view a mysterious leg rash— called “one of the nation’s most expensive and acrimonious.”
When the dust finally cleared, John Cornyn, 74, a man who has occupied his Senate seat for twenty-four years (longer than some of his voters have been alive), was not just defeated. He was politically vaporized. He was beaten by Ken Paxton, the sixty-three-year-old Texas Attorney General and pandemic-era lawsuit machine, in a landslide of epic proportions: 64% to 36%.
To put those numbers in perspective, if you are an incumbent senator and only get 36% of the vote, that means even your own immediate family members were probably looking at the ballot and thinking, You know, Ken Paxton really does have a good point about those Pfizer boosters.
🔥 The most amazing part of this stunning spectacle was the money. During the campaign, Paxton complained that Cornyn and the national GOP establishment outspent him ten-to-one. This sounds like standard political whining, but in this case, it was actually true.
According to public records, a staggering $128 million was spent on primary advertisements alone. Of that mountain of cash, $92 million went to support Cornyn.
Pause briefly and contemplate that number. Ninety-two million dollars. You could use that kind of money to buy a fleet of helicopters, a private island, or even maybe even three bags of groceries at Publix. The National Republican Party did everything short of physically dragging voters into the booths and holding their hands over the “Cornyn” button.
And yet, it was a total wipeout. It turns out that when voters are thoroughly sick of you, you can spend enough money to fund a small space program, and they will still look at your expensive streaming commercial and say, “That is a very nice high-definition video of a man I never want to see again.”
Of course, we should not be too hard on the GOP establishment. The establishment runs on very simple, logical rules designed by Deeply Serious People.
Rule 1: Electability. The Logic: Whoever has a proven record of winning general elections must be supported at all costs. The Reality: This works great until voters realize “electability” just means “has been sitting in the same chair since the Clinton administration.”
Rule 2: Fundraising. The Logic: Whoever can vacuum up the most cash from corporate donors is the strongest candidate. The Reality: This works great until you realize corporate donors do not actually vote, and actual voters are tired of being treated like Macy’s mannequins.
Admittedly, this system prevents nepotism and favoritism, and it stops the party from doing something incredibly stupid, like, oh, I don’t know, sliding in a cackling replacement candidate for president in the middle of the night while voters are sleeping. (Not that anyone would ever do that.)
But the system has a flaw: it assumes highly motivated primary voters have the memory of Dory from Finding Nemo.
🔥 The New York Times, of course, immediately framed this primary as a simple story of Trump’s Revenge! Because in the mind of a Times editor, Donald Trump is a Svengali-like magical hypnotist who controls the minds of every human being between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains.
It is true that Cornyn’s “sins” against the Trump agenda were relatively minor on paper. He voted with Trump 90% of the time. But there is a very simple way to tell which Republicans actually matter in the grand scheme of things, and it is what I call the New York Times Hate Index.
If you look at the Times’ topic page for John Cornyn over the last twenty years, you will find almost no headlines criticizing him. In fact, they barely mentioned him at all. In the entire year of 2023, he appeared by name in exactly two stories. When the Times did mention him, it was usually to pat him on the head and praise him for “defying Trump” to help Democrats pass more Ukraine aid.
In other words, John Cornyn was a cardboard senator. He was a placeholder. He was a very nice man who pressed the voting button the right way most of the time, but otherwise took up space that voters now urgently need for other purposes.
On the other hand, Ken Paxton sends the Times Hate Index completely off the charts. If Paxton so much as sneezes, the Times publishes a three-part investigative series on the environmental impact of his tissue paper. And to conservative voters in 2026, there is no greater recommendation than a front-page Times article weeping about how dangerous you are.
🔥 To understand the real reason Paxton won, you have to look back at the dark, bloodstained years of 2020 through 2022.
John Cornyn was part of the old McConnell Club. These were the traditional conservatives who managed the party through the wilderness years. They did some good things, like helping Trump build the Supreme Court we are currently enjoying. They also did some highly questionable things, like passing the Patriot Act (which Democrats immediately used to spy on Republicans) and the PREP Act (without which the entire pandemic-industrial complex would have gone nowhere).
The Good Old Boys Club
When the pandemic hit, the McConnell Club did what they always do: they passively went along with the flow. Cornyn, to his credit, opposed vaccine mandates. But his opposition mainly consisted of sitting in his office and quietly voting the right way as part of a group. He never raised his voice, he never made a scene, and he certainly never filed a lawsuit or even a strongly worded bill.
Meanwhile, Ken Paxton was behaving like a man possessed by the spirit of a highly caffeinated Doberman Pinscher.
As Attorney General, Paxton spent two years filing lawsuits against the Biden administration, Texas cities, and blue counties over lockdowns, school closures, and vaccine mandates. He didn’t just write angry press releases; he took them to court. And he is still doing it. He is currently suing Pfizer. He is suing hospitals over vaccine incentives. He is creative, he is relentless, and he simply refuses to go away.
The establishment, the media, and Texas RINOs tried everything they could to get rid of Paxton. They tried to criminally convict him. They tried to impeach him over a series of highly publicized and totally made-up scandals. The media gasped in performative shock and outrage.
But the voters looked at Paxton, looked at his record of fighting the lockdown regimes, and said, “We do not care about your complicated procedural scandals. We care that when the government tried to force us to stay in our houses and take experimental injections, you were the only attorney general who stood in their way.”
🔥 Now that Paxton has won and become the Republican candidate for Cornyn’s Senate seat, the Democrats are suddenly very excited, which is why this story made the top of the Times’ home page. They smell blood in the water. They have selected a young, white male progressive named James Talarico to run against Ken Paxton in the general election, and they are convinced that Paxton is so controversial that they might actually win.
100% non-Squad-like
The New York Times is drooling at the prospect. Of course, buried deep in the sixteenth paragraph of their coverage, it was forced to admit that Democrats have not won a Senate race in Texas since 1988, and have not won any statewide election there since 1994. To put that in perspective, the last time a Democrat won statewide in Texas, the top movie in theaters was The Lion King (the cartoon one, not the weird CGI one), and people were still using floppy disks and dial-up internet.
But they are hoping against hope for an upset. Mark my words: it is only a matter of time before the media deploys Paxton’s “anti-vaxxer” stance against him to rile up their base. When they do, it will prove once again that the pandemic is still the defining event of modern American politics.
In the meantime, the lesson of the Texas primary is clear: if you are a Republican politician who thinks you can survive in 2026 by being a quiet, polite cardboard cutout who never makes waves, you might want to start updating your resume.
Republican voters are looking for fighters, and they have a lot of cardboard to fold.
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There is a political phenomenon known as a “controlled demolition,” in which a very large, very ugly ideological structure is brought down not with a dramatic explosion but with a series of carefully placed, quiet charges that nobody seems to have set. The building just sort of folds in on itself. Bystanders look around. The dust settles. And a parking lot suddenly appears.
This is, more or less, what happened to the Squad in Illinois last Tuesday. Axios reported, “The “Squad” left faces complete wipeout in Illinois Democratic primaries.”
To remind our dear Portland readers, the Squad —or, as we shall call them henceforth, the Squid— is a collection of far-left Democrat congresspeople best known for their passionate advocacy of causes that poll somewhere between “abolish the police” and “free everything for everyone forever.” They are beloved by college campuses, progressive Twitter, and about four percent of the general voting public.
On Tuesday, at least five Squad-aligned candidates in Illinois Democrat congressional primaries were defeated by moderates. Some of them did not merely lose, but were crushed beyond recognition. And even though most of them had unpronounceable, vaguely Middle-Eastern or African surnames, and I am not making this up, like Kat Abughazaleh (literally, “Bug Zapper”).
Axios, which is a news organization that covers politics with the breathless urgency of someone who has drunk one too many espressos, described the result as “a virtually total collapse.” It also noted, shifting to the grave tone of a doctor delivering a terminal diagnosis, that this is “a bad sign for the dozens of insurgent Democrats running in congressional races across the country.”
🔥 Axios tried to tell its readers what happened. It fingered two culprits: AIPAC and crypto bro money. (Never mind that Ken Paxton just beat John Cornyn with 10% of his money. That’s just an unnecessary distraction.)
AIPAC, if you’re unfamiliar, is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a lobbying organization that has been “meddling” in Democrat primaries with the subtlety of a foghorn. Crypto money refers to the large and growing pile of bitcoin earnings that newly minted tech billionaires have been shoveling into progressive politics like a man desperately trying to heat his house by burning his own furniture.
Axios’s explanation was not completelywrong. AIPAC did spend money opposing pro-Palestine candidates. Crypto bros did fund some moderate challengers. That happened.
But here is the thing about blaming AIPAC and crypto money: it is a little like explaining that a Toyota Prius burned to a crisp because of oxygen. Technically accurate, but beside the point.
The more interesting question is why the broader Democrat Party apparatus —the donors, the consultants, the endorsement networks, the leadership-aligned figures who know exactly which phone calls to make and which ones not to return— all seemed to be pushing in the same direction at the same time. Quietly. Without a press release. Without a coordinated announcement. Just … quietly not helping the Squids, the way you quietly stop watering a potted palm you have decided you no longer want.
🔥 If you are a Simpsons fan, you’ll recall the popular meme in which Homer, having done or said something catastrophically awkward, slowly backs into a hedge and disappears. One moment he is there. The next moment there is just a hedge.
My hypothesis is that the Democrat Party’s current strategy toward its most radioactive far-left flank is a Homeric hedge retreat.
Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a man with the political instincts of someone who has read every book ever written about political instincts, was described by Axios as “most popular among the moderate and mainstream liberal wings of his party.” (Suddenly, there are ‘moderate’ and ‘mainstream’ Democrats again— who knew?)
The article called the Squid’s defeat “great news” for Jeffries. This was a very careful way of reminding Axios readers that Jeffries is not popular among the Squids, and that everyone is fine with that.
The beauty of the current arrangement is that nobody in Democrat leadership has to say anything publicly. They do not have to hold a press conference announcing, “We have decided that candidates who want to abolish ICE, defund the police, and deliver lengthy land acknowledgments about the colonial origins of the grocery store are perhaps not our strongest general election assets.” They do not have to fire anyone. They do not have to have that awkward conversation with people who are completely irrational.
They just let AIPAC and the crypto guys take the public blame, quietly withdraw the support infrastructure from the Squids, and back slowly into the hedge.
It is, to be honest, kind of elegant. It is the sort of thing that makes you think there might be actual adults somewhere deep in the DNC headquarters.
🔥 To be fair to the Squids —and I want to be fair, because fairness is important, and also because they are going to have a lot of free time on their hands starting immediately— they did not lose because their ideas are unpopular with everyone. Their ideas are very popular with a specific, enthusiastic, and extremely online constituency that expresses its support through the medium of strongly worded social media posts.
The problem is that strongly worded social media posts do not vote. Actual human beings in actual congressional districts vote. And without the party apparatus telling its Democrat voters what to think, actual human beings in actual congressional districts, it turns out, have a somewhat different set of priorities than the average gender studies major who has spent the last three years arguing about the geopolitical implications of a fast food chain’s ethical sourcing practices.
Bernie Sanders endorsed several of the losing candidates. Senator Elizabeth Warren, known to her fictional tribe as Wokahontas (literally, “Lady-With-Face-Like-Bird”), also lent her support. These endorsements, in 2026, appear to have the electoral potency of a strongly worded letter written in invisible ink and mailed to a Kinko’s PO box that no longer exists.
This is not a knock on Bernie Sanders as a human being. He is clearly a man of deep conviction who has been saying the same things since approximately 1987 and will continue saying them until the heat death of the universe. But there is a difference between being a beloved figure and being an effective kingmaker. At this point, a Bernie Sanders endorsement in a Democrat primary may actually now be functioning as a warning label.
🔥 Here is what is actually interesting about all of this, if you are the kind of person who finds American politics interesting, which you apparently are, since you are still reading.
The Democrat Party is attempting to do something very difficult: discipline itself without admitting it is doing that. It is trying to sand off its sharpest edges —the screaming, the slogans, the candidates whose primary qualification appears to be making a below-average peach margarita or wearing a burka— without triggering an internal civil war with the progressive base that would generate even more outrage.
This is like trying to give a very energetic toddler a nap without the toddler noticing it is being put to bed.
Whether it will work remains to be seen. The far left is not known for going quietly. There will be recriminations. There will be accusations of betrayal. There will be very long posts on Substack. There will, inevitably, be a podcast.
But if the Democrat Party is genuinely, quietly pivoting back toward the center —letting outside groups take the heat while the apparatus simply stops returning certain phone calls— then we may be watching the beginning of something that the American political system has needed for a long while: a correction.
Not a revolution, perhaps. Not even a dramatic reckoning. Just a slow, quiet, hedge-shaped disappearance.
Homer Simpson would nod approvingly.
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Yesterday, CBS ran a story under a boring headline designed to make your glazed eyeballs glide right past it, “DHS memo directs ICE to ramp up asylum-related fraud cases.” But buried deep in its bland beige exterior was a fairly explosive piece of news: the federal government is now authorized to civilly or criminally prosecute the activist lawyers who have long been coaching their clients to lie.
Here is a fun game you can play at home. Go to your local immigration court, pick any asylum case at random, and read the claim. There is an excellent chance —and by “excellent” I mean “statistically overwhelming”— that the claimant will vow that they face persecution or torture in their home country because of their race, their political opinion, or some other protected characteristic.
This is remarkable, if you think about it. Not because persecution is rare in the world. Persecution is, unfortunately, quite common. What is remarkable is the uniformity. Every single person, from every single country, facing every single set of circumstances, turns out to have a claim that fits perfectly into the exact legal language required for asylum. It is as if millions of poorly educated people independently arrived at the precise same conclusions about their situations, without any outside coaching whatsoever.
I mean, what are the odds? According to UN statistics, asylum applications rose from 19,000 in 2012 to an eye-watering 3.18 million in 2024.
🔥 As it turns out, we are getting a pretty good idea of how that happened. In the story, CBS reported that ICE lawyers are now authorized to civilly or criminally prosecute the activist NGO lawyers who have been coaching their clients to lie.
James Percival, the top ICE attorney, who seems to have decided that someone needed to say the quiet part out loud, drafted a new DHS memo. Percival wrote that “it has become standard practice for immigration lawyers to argue that virtually every illegal alien faces persecution or torture in their home country because of a protected characteristic such as race or political opinion.”
He continued: “The immigration bar and powerful Big Law pro bono practices frequently coach clients to conceal their past or lie about their circumstances when asserting their asylum claims.”
Now, “Big Law pro bono practices” is Washington bureaucrat-speak for very large, white-soled law firms that charge their corporate clients $1,200 an hour and then, for virtue-signaling points (and political favors from Democrats), devote a handful of associates to providing free legal services for asylum claimants. This structure, according to the Percival memo, is being systematically used to manufacture fraudulent claims on an industrial scale.
To be clear: we are not talking about a few bad apples. We are talking about what Percival described as standard practice. The legal equivalent of a factory assembly line, except instead of producing widgets, it produces asylum claims, each one carefully engineered to check the correct boxes, regardless of whether the underlying facts bear any resemblance to the boxes being checked.
Weird.
🔥 Here is the thing about asylum fraud that everybody has been pretending didn’t exist: it was entirely predictable.
The United States has spent the last several decades running what can only be described as an honor system for asylum claims. You arrive. You assert persecution. A lawyer —usually a free one, provided by a nonprofit funded through laundered taxpayer money— helps you frame your claim in the precise legal language most likely to succeed. The system, backlogged by years and staffed by people, some of whom are genuinely trying to do the right thing, gives you the entire benefit of the doubt.
And then we are surprised when people game it.
This is a little like installing a vending machine that dispenses free candy whenever you press a button, and then expressing shock that people are pressing the button. A great deal of human behavior can be explained by the simple observation that people respond to incentives. This is not a controversial insight. It is, in fact, the foundational premise of every economics textbook ever written. And yet, somehow, it was never applied to the asylum system.
The people arriving in this system, it should be noted, are frequently coming from some of the most difficult, most corrupt, most authoritarian societies on earth. This is not a criticism of them as individuals. It is an observation about the environments that shaped them. People who grow up in systems where the rules are arbitrary, where officials are corrupt, and where survival depends on finding the angle— those people, by necessity, become very good at finding the angle.
They have been trained by their circumstances to probe the edges of any system they encounter.
Importing large numbers of people with those adaptive skills into a system specifically designed to reward self-authenticated claims with minimal verification is not a humanitarian policy. It is an experiment. And like many experiments conducted without adequate controls, it has produced some unexpected results.
🔥 If you want a case study in how not to run an immigration program, consider the Biden administration’s so-called “Welcome Corps,” a private-sponsorship scheme that allowed U.S. residents to ‘sponsor’ refugees for resettlement. The idea was virtuous. The execution was, to use a technical term, a wasteland of fraud.
Almost immediately, reports emerged of people being asked to pay to be “included” in the program. Sponsors named refugees they barely knew. Fraud and scams proliferated with the speed and enthusiasm of a fungus in a warm, damp basement. The program was eventually shut down last summer by the Trump Administration, which at that point was essentially inheriting a system that had been left running unattended like a garden hose on a concrete driveway.
Just to pick one country at random, in the U.S. refugee program, Somalia, for example, has been one of the top origin countries. Just between 2012 and 2022, at least 46,000 Somali asylum refugees were resettled in the United States. The numbers increased dramatically under the Biden Administration’s Welcome Corps program. So.
A serious country, as one observer put it, would not run a cultural stress test at this scale until its border screenings, asylum adjudications, fraud detection, and enforcement mechanisms were clearly capable of swiftly punishing cheating and regularly rewarding honesty. The United States did not do this. The United States instead signaled, loudly and repeatedly, that self-authenticating claims with thin to no verification were basically a ticket to stay. And then it paid lawyers to help people from low-trust cultures write those claims.
🔥 The decision to begin prosecuting NGO lawyers is, as the original memo suggests, a good start. It is the legal equivalent of chopping the head off a coral snake: targeted, precise, and aimed at the mechanism that makes the whole snaky operation function.
For years, the activist legal community has operated on the safe assumption that helping clients lie on asylum claims was a form of advocacy. This is a creative interpretation of legal ethics. Most bar associations, when pressed, will confirm that “coaching clients to conceal their past or lie about their circumstances” is not, technically, what they had in mind when they wrote the rules about zealous representation.
It turns out there is a meaningful difference between arguing your client’s case aggressively and entirely fabricating the case. The prospect of civil, criminal, or bar prosecution tends to help clarify that distinction.
Of course, going after the lawyers is not a structural fix. The deeper problem —a porous, backlogged, highly discretionary asylum regime that was designed for a different era and a different volume of claims— will require actual legislation to repair. Legislation requires the Senate. The Senate is currently hamstrung by a 1970s-era silent filibuster rule.
So in the meantime, the Administration is doing whatever it can while Congress is unavailable: using every executive tool at its disposal to patch the leaks in a system that was never designed to handle the pressure it is currently under.
It is not a permanent solution. It is more like a very determined person with a very large roll of duct tape, working their way around a boat that has developed an impressive number of holes.
But it is progress. Stay tuned for much more.
Have a wonderful Wednesday! And back through the hedges till you get right back here tomorrow morning, for another delightful and delicious installment of essential news and caffeinated commentary.
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Rose Rambles... 