Leadership Quote by John Cornyn

A homespun idiom becomes a compact weather report on public life. When trouble starts, more follows; when clouds gather, they burst. John Cornyn tweaks the familiar saying with a wink, adding the metalinguistic tag line figuratively and literally to acknowledge both the cascade of events in politics and the actual downpours that batter his home state. Texas is a place where skies can turn violent in an afternoon and where floods expose the seams of infrastructure, preparedness, and social safety nets. The expression captures that compounding quality: one storm begets another, one failure reveals others, one headline spawns a week of them.

The phrase carries an odd American lineage. It is proverb and jingle at once, immortalized by a Morton Salt ad promising that even in humidity, the product will still pour. Over time it shifted into a shorthand for the clustering of misfortune. Cornyn’s addendum closes the loop, fusing the literal meteorology with the figurative storm surge of governance, scandal, and legislative gridlock. The dash underscores his timing: a conversational pause, then a pivot that broadens scope from weather to world.

There is resignation in it, but also craft. The line signals empathy to constituents sloshing through real rain, while gesturing at the broader sense that crises rarely arrive singly. It recognizes second-order effects: a storm is not just wind and water; it is detours, outages, price spikes, and policy debates about mitigation and resilience. In politics, the parallel is obvious: one event sets off investigations, messaging wars, and cascading consequences that few can fully control.

By naming both registers, Cornyn sidesteps pedantry about the word literally and lets the idiom do double duty. The result is a compact, wry realism: words can flood discourse, weather can flood streets, and the hardest work is done in the wake, when pouring stops but accumulation remains.