As recently as a few days ago, Rep. Van Taylor’s career appeared to be in pretty good shape. The Texas Republican was facing some primary rivals, but he was expected to prevail and win re-election with relative ease in his “red” congressional district.
The GOP incumbent had vastly more campaign funds than his challengers; he enjoyed endorsements from the NRA and prominent Republicans such as Sen. Ted Cruz; and the Congressional Leadership Fund, which is aligned with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, invested in the race in support of Taylor.
On Primary Day, he finished with nearly 49 percent of the vote, which meant he was slated to compete in a runoff election that he was likely to win. The Texas Republican had reason to be optimistic about his political future.
Yesterday afternoon, however, his career collapsed. NBC News reported:
Rep. Van Taylor, R-Texas, announced Wednesday he was dropping his re-election bid after having admitted to an extramarital affair. “Today I am announcing I will not continue my campaign to seek re-election to Congress,” Taylor said in an email to his supporters. “I want to apologize for the pain I have caused with my indiscretion, most of all to my wife Anne and our three daughters.”
To be sure, Taylor is hardly the first member of Congress to be derailed by a sex scandal, but by most measures, the details of his controversy are a bit worse than most. From the NBC News report:
Taylor withdrew days after conservative sites, including Breitbart, published allegations that he had had an affair with Tania Joya, a Plano resident referred to by tabloids as the “ISIS bride” because of her past marriage to an American who joined the Islamic State terrorist group. Joya told Breitbart News that Taylor had paid her to keep quiet about the affair.
At this point, it’s likely that some Democrats may be tempted to snicker a bit at Taylor’s misfortune. After all, he’s a conservative Republican who ruined his own career. Some schadenfreude may seem inevitable.
I’d caution against such thinking — not because I feel sorry for the GOP congressman, but because his successor will be worse.
It’d be a wild exaggeration to suggest Taylor is a Republican moderate on Capitol Hill. He is not. The Texan voted with the Trump White House roughly 90 percent of the time, and he’s voted with the Biden White House roughly 10 percent of the time. That said, Taylor faced two primary rivals, not because he was too conservative, but because many Texas Republicans decided he wasn’t conservative enough. In fact, the GOP incumbent voted to certify President Joe Biden’s victory early last year, and months later, he voted for a bipartisan compromise on creating a Jan. 6 commission. These rather mainstream votes led the right to go after the congressman for not being loyal enough to Donald Trump. As for the former president himself, he made nearly three dozen endorsements in this week’s Texas primaries, but he remained neutral in Taylor’s race. The congressman’s seat will now go to one of his even-more-conservative primary challengers. All of which is to say, the end of Taylor’s career isn’t necessarily a good thing, even for his Democratic critics.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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