John Cornyn is feeling aggrieved. Cornyn, the three-term senator from Texas, reports that his offices were flooded with constituent calls opposing the nomination of Michigan billionaire Betsy DeVos as U.S. Secretary of Education.

“They effectively crashed our voicemail system,” Senator Cornyn told reporters. Not only that, emailers and online posters “threatened to bring down our website and the like.” Miraculously, Cornyn and his staff lived to tell about the onslaught.

The senator believes he has figured out what caused the “unprecedented” volume of messages. “There’s no doubt that there was a concerted campaign by the Establishment to try and sink Mrs. DeVos’s nomination.” Not only was there conspiracy, Cornyn added, there were plenty of sour grapes: “I think that this is part of the angry response to the fact that President Trump won.”

Cornyn did not reveal exactly how many of his 28 million constituents contacted his offices, just that there was a lot of them, a seething mass of sore losers, animated and empowered by the machinations of a shadowy cabal of establishment figures. These pesky constituents tied up phone lines. They kept staff members away from doing important senatorial work, like assisting Mr. Cornyn in drafting Senate Resolution 13, “Recognizing the historical importance of Associate Justice Clarence Thomas”; or helping him craft important tweets on public policy, like “Rut-roh: Punxsutawney Phil sees shadow, predicts 6 more weeks of winter” and “Nice birthday present from my colleague, Senator Cruz,” featuring a photo of a pair of boxing gloves, autographed by that great pugilist, Senator Ted “America has always been best when she is lying down with her back on the mat” Cruz.

Nice birthday present from my colleague, Senator Cruz pic.twitter.com/KOw3plIo3r — JohnCornyn (@JohnCornyn) February 2, 2017

In Cornyn’s world, being an elected representative who actually has to hear from the electorate is a real buzzkill.

The only possible explanation for the system overload the senator’s offices experienced last week is an organized effort by “the establishment.” Cornyn knows a bit about the establishment: He has spent roughly half his life in public office. He’s been a state district judge in Bexar County, a member of the Texas State Supreme Court, Texas Attorney General, and since 2003, a U.S. senator.

In 2013, annual disclosure statements revealed that Cornyn is that rarest of political confections, the Triple Dipper, collecting pensions from the Judicial Retirement System of Texas ($48,807 annually), the Employees Retirement System of Texas ($7,645 annually), and the Texas County and District Retirement System ($6,444 annually), in addition to his $174,000 Senate salary. When he finally leaves the Senate, he’ll take with him a fourth pension, which could be as high as $139,200 a year, depending on his length of senatorial service.

How Establishment do you have to be to qualify for four government pensions, totaling over $180,000 a year? Pretty darn Establishment.

I was one of the people who called Senator Cornyn’s office. No one asked me to do it. Phone banks, George Soros and my blinding rage over the election of Donald Trump were not involved. (My blinding rage has mellowed into something approaching a low-grade fever: I still feel lousy, and achy, and most of the time, my heart thumps like John Bonham playing “Moby Dick,” but there’s work to do and bills to pay, so what’s the point in being enraged?) I was stuck in some hellacious traffic at the intersection of Hammerly and the Beltway, and NPR ran a story about DeVos’s clueless nomination hearing, and I said, “I gotta call my senator.”

A sad-sounding fellow answered the phone, heard my comment, asked for my ZIP Code, thanked me, and hung up. The conversation took seven seconds. I felt better afterward. I felt like I had made my voice heard.

Opposition to DeVos’s nomination here in Texas has been vocal and bipartisan. Facebook is hardly a source for scientific data, but after Cornyn posted a photo of himself and DeVos, with the notice, “I’ll be voting to confirm…” more than 37,000 people responded. 3,724 pressed the “like” button. 3,467 pressed the “sad face” button, and 30,275 pressed the “angry” button.

One of the 36,267 comments on the post read, “Lifelong Republican and more importantly, true conservative no longer voting for you. Very disappointed.”

Another wrote, “I have voted for you twice…I thought you were a man of integrity. You know Betsy DeVos is completely unqualified and reckless….Shame on you.”

DeVos brings a limited skill set to her new position. She has no experience in teaching, administering, or even attending public schools, but she is a billionaire, and she loves the Lord, and she is supposed to be very pleasant company. She also thinks that a significant chunk of America’s schoolchildren are under threat of grizzly bear attack. Take out the billionaire thing, and that’s pretty much my mom. (Mom’s never said anything about grizzlies in the schools, but she does think sharks are capable of attacking helicopters, which is just as crazy.) Mom is great — on top of a wonderful personality, she bakes a terrific cherry pie, and unlike DeVos, she’s a retired school teacher — but I wouldn’t support her nomination as secretary of education, either.

DeVos’s merits aren’t really the issue here. Neither are her very Establishment political connections. According to a report published by the Center for American Progress, the DeVos family has contributed nearly $1 million to the campaigns of 23 sitting U.S. senators. Aside from Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, who received $43,200 in DeVos money, they all voted for confirmation. Throw in a couple of vulnerable GOP senators, like Mr. Cornyn and Arizona’s Jeff Flake, desperate to assert their conservative bona fides in these Trumpy times, and DeVos’s nomination was a fait acompli.

The real issue is that a man elected to represent our state in the Senate, a man who has taken an oath to “well and faithfully discharge the duties” has decided that listening to his constituents is too much trouble. It’s not his pro-DeVos vote that matters — we sent him to Washington to vote his conscience, and if his conscience doesn’t line up with our conscience, we can work to vote him out in 2020; that’s what representative democracy is all about — it’s his cynical, self-serving dismissal of tens of thousands of voices as an annoyance, a gripe fest, a carefully organized attack on the well-oiled machine that is the Federal government.

The people, independent, well-informed, and eloquent, rose up to give voice to our outrage. Our elected representative sniffed, shook his head, and murmured, “Let them eat vouchers.”

Mr. Cornyn is right about one thing. The country that we love is being suffocated by the Establishment. It’s an establishment too busy taking care of itself, too busy cashing government pension checks and drafting self-reverential resolutions and complaining that their constituents want to be heard, to actually pay attention.

He would do well to start listening to us.

Cort McMurray is a Houston businessman and a frequent contributor to Gray Matters.

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