During a highly charged Senate hearing on Tuesday, Texas Republican John Cornyn demanded the resignation of Attorney General Eric Holder. That Cornyn would emerge from GOP central casting to lead the right-wing witch hunt against Holder comes as no surprise (and not just because of his staunch opposition to man-box turtle marriage). After all, back in 2009 Senator Cornyn tried to block Holder's nomination in order to secure protection for the Bush torture team. In the wake of the 2005 Schiavo affair, the former chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court threatened judges from the Senate floor. He called the investigation of Bush administration officials who outed covert CIA operative Valerie Plame an effort to "smear the president" and later tried to block subpoenas for Karl Rove and Harriet Miers over the 2007 prosecutors purge by claiming Democrats were engaged in a "political witch hunt." And in 2006, Judge Cornyn defended President Bush's illegal NSA domestic surveillance program by declaring, "None of your civil liberties matter much after you're dead."
That record not only makes Big, Bad John Cornyn a Texas-sized hypocrite. It means he's the very model of a modern major Republican.
