Capitulating to Trump Gets You Nothing.

Apparently Jared Polis hasn't learned this yet.

This is “What I’m Hearing” — a somewhat daily guide to the stories that matter, drawn from the best pro-democracy political writers working right now, with my analysis on top.

John Cornyn Spent a Decade Bending the Knee. It Got Him Nothing.

On Tuesday night, Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who has been indicted on three felony securities-fraud counts, impeached by his own Republican legislature, and reported to the FBI for bribery by eight of his own former staffers, beat four-term Sen. John Cornyn in the GOP runoff by more than 28 points.

Cornyn did everything the accommodationist playbook told him to. He spent a decade defending Trump, flattering Trump, voting with Trump, and trying to name a highway after Trump. Andrew Egger at The Bulwark articulated it perfectly: Cornyn made himself a dog for Trump, and Trump put him down like a dog. The reward for ten years of loyalty was a Truth Social post calling him “VERY disloyal” and an endorsement of the most scandal-soaked man in Texas politics.

Dan Pfeiffer makes the case that Paxton just handed Democrats their best Texas opportunity in a generation. Paxton is “uniquely vulnerable” — a corruption-plagued nominee against state Rep. James Talarico, a young, seminary-trained Democrat who already polls better against Paxton than Cornyn did. Trump won Texas by 14 points in 2024, but the ground is shifting: earlier this year, a Democrat flipped a state Senate seat Trump had carried by 17 points, with majority-Hispanic precincts swinging by 34 points. The DCCC says turnout in 46 majority-Hispanic counties ran 33% above the 2024 primaries, with Democrats casting two-thirds of those ballots. This is shaping up to be the most competitive Texas Senate race in over 30 years.

Inside the Republican Party, Trump’s power is now close to absolute. He can end the career of a four-term senator from a safe seat over a personal grudge, and thanks to the slush fund, he can buy the silence of everyone left standing. That is real, and it is dangerous. But the price of that total internal control is that the GOP keeps nominating people like Ken Paxton, and Paxton has to win a general election. That's not a trade Republicans can keep making forever.

Read more: The Bulwark (Egger & Kristol), The Message Box (Pfeiffer), The Bulwark (JVL), Hopium Chronicles.

Senator Andy Kim Was Pepper-Sprayed by ICE.

On Monday, federal ICE agents pepper-sprayed a sitting United States senator.

Andy Kim of New Jersey was pepper-sprayed outside of Delaney Hall — a 1,000-bed immigration detention center in Newark run by the GEO Group under a 15-year, billion-dollar federal contract. Heather Cox Richardson lays out what set it off: roughly 300 detainees launched a hunger and work strike on Friday over worm-infested food, denied medical care, and a court docket so overloaded that one judge handled 74 cases in a single day. Senator Kim and Rep. Rob Menendez Jr. toured the facility Saturday. Kim came out describing an 18-year-old crying that she just wanted to graduate high school, a pregnant woman with no OB-GYN care, a woman who had miscarried with no medical attention, a mother separated from her four-month-old, and a man being threatened with deportation to a country with an active Ebola outbreak. When Kim returned to protest the conditions, ICE pepper-sprayed him. When Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill tried to enter on Monday, she was turned away, which, as she put it, raised “serious questions about what they are trying to hide.”

None of this makes us any safer. The motivation here is profit. Delaney Hall is what the for-profit prison system looks like. GEO Group has a billion-dollar contract that pays them by the bed to detain people, which means every additional detainee, every day, is revenue, and the conditions that produced the hunger strike are the predictable result of running a jail for profit.

Read more: Letters from an American, The Parnas Perspective.

A Democratic Governor Caved to Trump’s Pressure.

Gov. Jared Polis commuted the sentence of Tina Peters, the Mesa County clerk and Steve Bannon acolyte who tried to overturn the 2020 election from inside her own election office, after months of public pressure from Trump.

Peters’ very first move after her release was to claim that the censure of Polis by his own party proved the existence of an election-rigging cover-up — meaning the concession didn’t even buy goodwill; it bought a fresh conspiracy theory. The Colorado Court of Appeals had already vacated Peters' sentence in April, upholding her conviction but ordering that she be resentenced. Polis didn't have to do this.

Brian Tyler Cohen frames this correctly: “Trump now has a blueprint. He knows that if he attacks someone enough, if he threatens to sic his army of supporters on someone enough, they will relent and bend to his will.” Polis now joins the capitulation roster alongside the law firms, the universities, the TV networks, and the tech companies that have already folded.

This coincides with another Democratic unforced error this week. The Senate Banking Committee advanced the Clarity Act, crypto legislation with no ethics guardrails for elected officials, which an analyst at Americans for Financial Reform told Zeteo “could make the Trump family Vanderbilt-level rich if they play their cards right.” The Trump family has already pulled an estimated $800 million from crypto in the first six months of this term. Two Democrats, Ruben Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks, voted to advance it, with Gallego conceding they hadn’t even finished negotiating the ethics provisions.

Trump’s leverage is real, but a meaningful amount of it is donated by Democrats unable or unwilling to acknowledge where we are as a country. There's a fair argument that Peters' original sentence was harsh, and in normal times, a governor working to remedy that would be unremarkable. But it isn't 2015. The court had already vacated it, and the move only made sense as a concession to Trump.

Polis didn’t need to act here, and he got nothing in exchange. Not a concession from Tina Peters, not an admission that what she did was wrong, not an admission that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen. Gallego and Alsobrooks were not cornered either; they cast votes that moved a bill enriching the president’s family.

This story is part of a reality that both parties keep refusing to acknowledge. John Cornyn and Bill Cassidy spent years capitulating to Trump. Both had their careers ended by him. Capitulating to Trump gets you nothing. Republicans are figuring that out one career at a time. Some Democrats are still learning.

Read more: Brian Tyler Cohen, Zeteo.

That's your Wednesday. Ken Paxton ended John Cornyn's career by 28 points — and may have put Texas in play. ICE pepper-sprayed Senator Andy Kim outside a billion-dollar for-profit prison. And Jared Polis folded to Trump.