Senator John Cornyn

This morning Senator Cornyn was elected Chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

In this role he will oversee 2010's Senate races across the country.

RealClearPolitics reports on the event here.

LoneStarTimes reports on the event here.

The Dallas Morning News offers their take in an article here.

Here's some pictures from Senator Cornyn's victory night party:

Check out more photos at our Flickr page.

Senator Cornyn claimed victory Tuesday night over opponent Rick Noriega.

News8Austin has a short clip of Senator Cornyn from last night here.

Check out MSNBC's interactive map of the results from across Texas by clicking here.

The Houston Chronicle has a piece on the victory here.

Prairie Pundit blogs on the win here.

Lonnie Walker, Yeah, Right, Whatever,  and UrbanGrounds also offer their thoughts on the win.

Pictures from the victory party in the works.

Live blogging from Senator Cornyn's Victory Party at the Four Seasons in Austin.

Texas polls close soon and we'll be keeping you updated throughout the night.

7:05

Robbie Cooper of UrbanGrounds just showed up.

7:15

Texas Railroad Commissioner Michael Williams is here, as are many members of the press.

7:35

The first results are coming in.

Blogger Josh Hebert just got here.

7:44

Senator McCain just won Georgia according to MSNBC and Beth Woodfin from Yeah, Right, Whatever.

7:55

Hundreds of people are packed in a room awaiting the Senator's speech to come in a little.

8:30

Senator Cornyn still leads Rick Noriega.

9:10

Jim Cardle from Texas Insider just stopped by.

10:00

Senator Cornyn just declared victory in a speech. Pictures to come.

Today is Election Day and Senator Cornyn needs your vote!

Check out our issues page if you want to know where Senator Cornyn stands on the issues important to you.

If you don't know your polling location you can click here to find out where you vote.

Please use this thread to leave a comment for Senator Cornyn and be sure to check back tonight as we live-blog from the victory party.

With the election just days away, Senator Cornyn discusses the importance of voting and getting out the vote:

One of the biggest challenges I faced as the governor of Massachusetts was the inclination of my Democratic legislature to raise taxes. That's not an easy thing to stop. My legislature was 85 percent Democrat, and that makes it tough for a Republican governor. I came in when we had a huge budget gap, and the economy was losing thousands of jobs a month. It turned out to be a $3 billion budget gap, but we solved it mostly by cutting back on the scale of government. The Democrats had tried to solve the problem the year before I came into office by raising taxes. It shouldn't surprise you to learn that raising taxes did not solve the problem. So, after I was elected, they gave me new budgetary powers to tackle the spending side of the budget. We had to make a lot of tough choices. We cut back on revenue sharing with our cities and towns, and we eliminated agencies and departments. There are so many examples of waste. Here's one that stands out: we had two parks departments, one that managed the urban parks and a different department that managed parks in other parts of the state. It didn't make a lot of sense, so we merged them. One newsman said I didn't just go after the sacred cows; I went after the whole herd. By the time I left office, we had fewer executive branch employees, we had restocked the rainy day fund from about $600 million when we arrived to more than $2 billion, we balanced the budget every single year without raising taxes and Wall Street responded to this new period of fiscal responsibility with a credit rating upgrade. Now, as Republicans, we have a tough job facing us on the national stage. We have spent dramatically - our deficit has ballooned to nearly half a trillion dollars. No wonder Americans are very upset and wondering where it is our country is heading. Let me tell you, spending can be controlled. We can control earmarks. We can control pork. We can put a cap on discretionary spending. We can restrain entitlement growth. One of my favorite stories is that after I was elected governor and we were searching for places of excess to cut, I was looking at the homeless budget and saw that we were spending millions of dollars a year on hotel rooms. And I said, "What's that?" And my staff explained that if a homeless person shows up at a shelter and it's full, we put them up in a hotel. And I said, "Boy, I bet the word gets around." It was costing us $20 million a year. So I announced a simple change of policy - from now on, when someone comes to the shelter and it's full, the person who's been there the longest gets to go to the hotel. By the end of the year, we were spending zero on hotel rooms. And the millions we saved we used to help people get on their feet, to get them into more permanent housing. So, eliminating waste and doing things smarter and more efficiently has to be our brand as Republicans. I'm grateful to Senator Cornyn for hosting this online discussion of fiscal issues because I think he understands better than most what is at stake in this election year. The Democrats, led by Barack Obama, are poised to bring real change to Washington, just not the change we want. They have an agenda to increase spending and raise taxes. They're going to talk about raising taxes on just the very wealthy. And there's no question they will stop the Bush tax cuts. But what will that mean for our national economy? Short term, it will mean higher federal spending on the very expensive programs they want to put in place. Long term, it means lower growth, more joblessness and falling incomes for all Americans. But it doesn't end there - they want higher taxes on Social Security, on corporations, on energy companies. Barack Obama is not hiding these plans from the public. He talks about them openly, although he's willing to forestall them until the economy is stronger. Remarkably, by offering to delay his tax program, Senator Obama is acknowledging the potential harm that will be caused if his platform is enacted. Let's look at the corporate tax for a minute here. It's something that people in the private sector talk about all the time. It's something I used to talk about with my business colleagues during my time in the private sector. It helped determine where we were going to invest, where we should build new property, plants and equipment, and where we were going to hire new people. It wasn't abstract theory to us. We shunned high tax states. Now consider this: the United States, next to Japan, has the highest corporate tax rate in the world, and this hurts our global competitiveness. Ireland has gone in a different direction. They realized that if you lower taxes enough, you create growth, and that translates into more jobs and more revenue to the government. As a nation, we need to come to a similar realization that we can't afford to have a tax rate on companies that is out of alignment with the other major economies of the world. We're going to have to bring our corporate tax rate down, as John McCain has proposed, or we're going to make it hard to get our economy moving again. I've gone on long enough here. As you all know, we've got a lot of challenges, but I am optimistic. We have an opportunity to make real change this election year with strong leadership on budget and tax issues. These types of discussions are helpful, and I want to thank Senator Cornyn for the opportunity to participate.

A guest post by Panhandle Poet.

Fiscal policy, which is the level of taxes and spending, is one of two tools used by government to influence the overall performance of the economy.  The second tool, monetary policy, which is the manipulation of the money supply within the economy, is the tool we commonly see used when we hear of the Fed raising or lowering interest rates.

Taxes place a drag on the economy because they shift income from earners to a significant consumer of that income - the government.  Government is necessary for providing certain services, yet is an inefficient allocator of spending.  There is frictional loss of economic power through the re-distribution process.  However, taxes are necessary to fund the government and have been structured through the years to influence behavior through various exemptions and credits.

Government spending on the other hand can stimulate the economy.  This creates conflict however, because of the offsetting drag of taxation to fund that spending unless funded through borrowing.  Borrowing moves the burden of the stimulus temporally.  If unchecked, it can consume an inordinate amount of the budget and drain the economy of its energy.  There is also the ever-present danger of inflation which, since the late 1970's, has been mostly controlled through careful attention to monetary policy.

When social engineering agendas drive the legislative process, we see an imbalance enter into fiscal policy.  Such imbalances can overload the ability of monetary policy to make corrections and keep the economy functioning properly.  Over time, continued pressure for sustained economic growth while creating an overburden of debt, creates a situation in which significant corrections must occur.  When such corrections are further influenced by corrupt practices and insufficient oversight, significant economic turmoil will be the result - as we are currently experiencing. 

The social agenda espoused by the Democratic Party, coupled with the re-distributive schemes of their nominee for the Presidency, would cause dire consequences to our economy if enacted.  The solution to our current woes is to shift spending away from an inefficient government and into the hands of the people who earned it.  Government should return to the role of oversight and policy rather than attempting to nationalize our financial institutions.

Grover Norquist, President of American's for Tax Reform, shares his thoughts on Senator Cornyn's support of the tax payer protection pledge: