Alan Grayson (D-FL) vs Arkansas Extremist Tom Cotton

Beltway pundits are always smitten with aloof intellectual phonies. Paul Ryan has been the most obvious example in recent years but Arkansas pedant Tom Cotton— another Harvard-educated reactionary is always such a curiosity… like a circus freak show— is catching up. The closet case thing makes it all the more of a set up for a future Shakespearean blockbuster… down the line. Right now, though, as Greg Sargent pointed out for his Washington Post readers Tuesday, Cotton is making news by claiming ISIS terrorists are working with Mexican cartels to infiltrate Arkansas. And he isn’t being laughed out of his Senate race. From Cotton’s audio town hall:

“The problem is with Mark Pryor and Barack Obama refusing to enforce our immigration laws, and refusing to secure our border. I’ll change that when I’m in the United States Senate. And I would add, it’s not just an immigration problem. We now know that it’s a security problem. Groups like the Islamic State collaborate with drug cartels in Mexico who have clearly shown they’re willing to expand outside the drug trade into human trafficking and potentially even terrorism.

  “They could infiltrate our defenseless border and attack us right here in places like Arkansas. This is an urgent problem and it’s time we got serious about it, and I’ll be serious about it in the United States Senate.”

This is pure Republican fantasy from crazy websites, fringe magazines and coked-up Hate Talk Radio hosts— repurposed as opportunistic scare tactics by demagogues like Tom Cotton. As Sargent concludes, “For Congressman Cotton, this story is something of a political two-fer. On the one hand, he has sought to exploit the ISIS threat to attack Democratic Senator Mark Pryor as weak on national security. Meanwhile, Cotton has also sought to exploit the crisis of migrant children crossing the southern border to attack Pryor as weak on border security. Yet each of these lines of attack may be at risk of losing potency. After all, Cotton voted just as Pryor did on how to respond to the ISIS threat, supporting Obama’s plan to arm the Syrian rebels. Meanwhile, the migrant crisis has faded from the news— and perhaps so have fears about the border. And so, through the wonders of political alchemy, Cotton has fused the two charges together, reinvigorating both and making the new product far more frightening than either one on its own ever was.”

Cotton’s new TV ad— which makes plenty of use of his latest political acquisition, the new spanking new beard that “disproves” the flood of gay rumors— forcefully asserts that he’s a leader, not a backbencher. Alan Grayson knows Cotton better than anyone else I know. They serve on the House Foreign Affairs Committee together— and Grayson is not impressed.

Last year the House Foreign Affairs Committee “marked up” an Iran Sanctions bill, taking amendments from committee members before sending the bill to the “Floor” for a House vote.



I offered five amendments. They all passed.



It’s hard to believe, I know, but there actually is a spirit of bipartisanship on the Foreign Affairs Committee, so things went smoothly— until it was Tom Cotton’s turn.



Some background on Cotton: The Bush Administration created a secret program, of questionable constitutionality, that aggressively monitored the finances of alleged terrorists. The New York Times uncovered the program, and reported it. Tom Cotton, private citizen, called for the arrest, conviction and incarceration of the editor and two reporters who reported on the secret program.



In a deep red district in Arkansas, that soapboxing was good enough to get Cotton elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Which plopped him down on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, with me.



No matter what the subject before our committee might be, Cotton always has to hold forth on how much he loves America. According to Cotton, he really, really loves America. Almost in the biblical sense.



Let me put it this way: When I hear Cotton, I think of Lady Macbeth, another great patriot. “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!”



Which, in Arkansas, qualifies Cotton for the U.S. Senate. Yes, Tom Cotton is running for the U.S. Senate.

And we have to try to stop him. Click here, if you want to lend a hand, and keep this schmo out of the U.S. Senate.



So anyway, there we were, trying to pass a bill that would keep Iran from getting nukes, and Cotton thought that he had come up with the perfect idea: imprison all of the Ayatollah’s relatives. Not the Ayatollah himself, just his relatives.



Cotton offered an amendment that would extend sanctions under the bill not only to the high government officials of Iran, but also to their relatives “to the third degree of consanguinity.” In case you missed the quiz on consanguinity, that’s children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, parents, brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, uncles, aunts, grandparents and great-grandparents.



But somehow, not second cousins twice removed. It must have been an oversight.



The enforcement mechanism for our sanctions is a criminal penalty. Specifically, five years in a federal prison. So if the Ayatollah violated our sanctions law, and his entirely innocent niece visited the United States, she’d get five years in the slammer under the Cotton Amendment. Just for being the Ayatollah’s niece.



By the way, the Cotton Amendment is a constitutional threefer: it violates three different provisions of the U.S. Constitution at the same time. They are the Fifth Amendment, the Eighth Amendment, and the very rarely heard of “Corruption of Blood” clause. It’s rarely heard of because almost no one is so stupid as even to contemplate punishing the relatives of wrongdoers.



Except for Tom Cotton.

When Cotton offered his amendment, I was tempted to say, “Now wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute.” But that would have been disrespectfully to Bugs Bunny and possibly others, so I didn’t. Instead, I patiently pointed out the constitutional infirmities of the Cotton Amendment.



To their credit, the Republican Members of Congress have some regard for the oath that they took to preserve the Constitution (as they see it), so there were certain murmurings on the other side of the aisle. The GOP Chairman asked Cotton to withdraw his amendment, and he reluctantly did so.



I thought that that would be the end of it. But no. Cotton came to me afterward, and offered to “work with me” to put his amendment back in the bill before the House voted on it. As one Harvard Law School graduate to another, I asked Cotton how he thought that imprisoning nieces for the acts of their uncles was constitutional. He told me, “they’re just foreigners; they have no rights.”



I think that he pronounced it “feriners.”



Seriously, it’s bad enough that someone like this got elected to the House. We have to stop him before he makes it to the Senate.



If Tom Cotton lived in Gotham City, he would reside at the Elizabeth Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane. But since Cotton’s home is Arkansas, not Arkham, that makes him a Congressman instead, and now a U.S. Senate candidate.



Cotton’s opponent is Senator Mark Pryor. Pryor is not my favorite Senator, but Tom Cotton makes Mark Pryor look like Mother Theresa.