Cornyn flies with jet set on taxpayers’ tab

John Cornyn is a hypocrite.

The junior Republican senator has served as his party’s attack dog, attempting to paint Democrats as “tax-and-spend liberals.”

But, as Politico and a Dallas TV station reported last week, Cornyn ran up the highest bill for domestic travel in all of Congress for the first six months of the year — almost $155,000.

That doesn’t count the other taxpayer-paid foreign junkets nor the freebies from the folks who keep him bought and paid for.

Thousands of dollars went for a 59-member staff retreat in Maryland. And more thousands were for chartered private-jet flights between Washington and Texas and within Texas.

This from a member of a Congress who excoriated the Big Three auto executives for flying to Washington in corporate jets to beg for bailout money to make up for the gross incompetence these executives have shown over the years.

What a bunch of hypocrites.

Cornyn’s defense was that Texas’ vast distances and small communities lacking commercial service required the use of aircraft that cruise at about $2,500 or more an hour so he could listen to his constituents.

We don’t believe that for a nanosecond. We’ve covered enough “high-level” politicians to know their staffs’ behind-the-scenes work is to accomplish nothing more than photo ops and sound bites. Listen to little town Texas? Ha.

The people who bought and paid for politicos like Cornyn and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, and to whom they listen, live in Austin, Dallas, Houston, Corpus Christi and El Paso — and smaller places like Midland and Amarillo.

Those have commercial air service.

If Cornyn and Hutchison, who ran up an $88,000 travel tab, really want to listen to their constituents with real-life problems, they should try flying coach or, better yet, taking a Greyhound bus.

These two self-appointed aristocrats, a form of royalty and the very thing our Founding Fathers disdained, won’t even deign to mix with real people.

That’s why real people need to turn them out of office as soon as possible.