Texas’ rabidly anti-LGBTQ+ Attorney General Ken Paxton will run for the U.S. Senate against incumbent John Cornyn (R-TX) in 2026. Paxton has called Cornyn a “RINO” — which refers to a “Republican in name only” who is insufficiently supportive of President Donald Trump — and Cornyn has called Paxton a “con man” and “fraud.”

Cornyn is a four-time Senate incumbent who used to serve on the Texas Supreme Court and as the state’s attorney general. Like Paxton, he has a long anti-LGBTQ+ record.

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“It’s official. I’m running for U.S. Senate to fight for President Trump’s agenda and take a sledgehammer to the D.C. establishment,” Paxton wrote on X on Tuesday. “Together, let’s send John Cornyn packing.”

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His post included a video of him announcing his candidacy on The Ingraham Angle, which is hosted by anti-LGBTQ+ Fox News host Laura Ingraham. On the show, he noted that if Cornyn is re-elected, he will have spent nearly three decades in Congress.

“It’s definitely time for a change in Texas,” Paxton said. “We have another great U.S. senator, Ted Cruz, and it’s time that we have another great senator who will stand up and fight for Republican values, fight for the values of the people of Texas and also support Donald Trump.”

On Wednesday morning, Cornyn criticized Paxton’s announcement, saying that “hundreds of millions of dollars” will potentially need to be spent defending Paxton’s candidacy, preventing the money from supporting more viable Republican candidates in other states.

“Obviously, Mr. Paxton has a checkered past,” Cornyn said. “He is a con man and a fraud, and I think the people of Texas know that. This is what will be litigated over the course of this campaign.” 

Paxton was previously impeached by the Texas House in 2023 for 16 counts of bribery but was later acquitted by the Texas Senate. The FBI also investigated him for years for securities fraud, but the Department of Justice eventually dropped its investigation. He also settled a state securities fraud case against him, paying $300,000 and participating in community service to avoid legal charges.

During his tenure as state attorney general, Paxton has said consensual encounters between consenting same-sex adults should be illegal and that state workers can deny marriage licenses to same-sex couples. He has argued that doctors should be allowed to deny care to transgender patients and that it should be legal to discriminate against trans people at work, and he has tried to force a school to cancel its Pride week. He also tried to prosecute gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth as a form of “child abuse” (something that hindered the state’s ability to investigate actual child abuse).

Paxton has sued for the right to discriminate against LGBTQ+ students, sued a group that highlighted the rise in hate speech on Elon Musk’s social media platform X, and recently sued the National College Athletic Association (NCAA) to force it to inspect every athlete’s gender before allowing them to play. He has also been trying to compile a list of trans Texans and to obtain trans people’s medical records from other states.

While serving on the Texas Supreme Court, Cornyn voted to preserve anti-sodomy laws that criminalize consensual same-sex encounters between adults. He played a leading role in introducing a federal constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriages, calling them a “radical social experiment” that harms kids and heterosexual marriages. He opposes allowing same-sex couples to adopt children and says that trans people serving in the military “divides the nation.”

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