Adams, John
1797–1801

Adams was an institutionalist lawyer above all — he defended the British soldiers at the Boston Massacre trial in 1770 because rule of law required competent representation for unpopular defendants, and he was deeply anti-faction, anti-mob, anti-French-Revolution-extremism, and committed to the integrity of legal and constitutional process. Cornyn — a former Texas Supreme Court Justice and former Texas Attorney General who built his Senate career on Judiciary Committee work, judicial-confirmation institutional discipline, and bipartisan rule-of-law projects — fits the Adams framework about as closely as any current Republican senator does. His January 6 vote to certify the election, his measured response to Paxton's primary attacks, and his decades of careful constitutional-process Senate work read as straightforward Adams-tradition behavior. Talarico's institutionalism, anti-corruption package, term limits and SCOTUS ethics code framework, and refusal to take corporate PAC money fit Adams's framework too. He drops some points on expanded federal government and on some populist economic rhetoric Adams would have found inconsistent with prudent institutional restraint.