Turncoat Tom Cotton

08/15/2024

08/16/2022

U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton called the FBI "an enforcement arm of the Democratic Party" on Tuesday as he visited New Hampshire.

The Arkansas Republican was in New Hampshire helping GOP candidates for office heading into the midterm elections, making stops in Manchester and on the Seacoast.

At Belmont Hall in Manchester on Tuesday morning, Cotton criticized the FBI for executing a search warrant at former President Donald Trump's home last week, reportedly to recover classified documents.

In front of Granite State Republicans and in an interview with News 9, Cotton said he believes the Justice Department's case will end up being thin.

"The attorney general released the warrant last week, but the warrant is very general," Cotton said. "There's an underlying affidavit which, lo and behold, he won't release, because I suspect there may not be much to it."

The Justice Department has opposed the release of the affidavit, saying the release could jeopardize the ongoing investigation because witnesses would be reluctant to cooperate.

The search of Mar-a-Lago is an unprecedented situation, but some New Hampshire Republicans said they agree with Cotton's criticism of the search.

"It was a tragedy," said Gary Gahan, of Goffstown. "It didn't have to happen."

Without much fanfare, Cotton has become a regular visitor to New Hampshire, primarily to help GOP candidates for office. During Tuesday's visit, he criticized the new climate, health care and tax legislation that was signed into law by President Joe Biden.

"Spending $80 billion on the IRS? So they can hire 87,000 new agents?" Cotton said. "That's more money than we spend on the Marine Corps every year. That's almost half the number of Marines we have. I'd much sooner have 87,000 new Marines than I would IRS agents."

The estimated 87,000 hires at the IRS funded in the new bill include a range of positions, and many would be to replace workers who are expected to retire or quit, according to an Associated Press fact check. Administration officials said audit rates for those earning less than $400,000 per year are not expected to increase.

Cotton was asked if he's thinking about running for president in 2024. He sidestepped the question, responding that the target right now is the midterm elections, but there are some New Hampshire Republicans who said they would like to see more of him.

"I'm hoping he will be one of our future leaders," said Claira Monier, of Goffstown. "He does have the experience, he has the ideas, and he does have the courage to come forward this early and start here in New Hampshire."

By Adam Sexton

U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton called the FBI "an enforcement arm of the Democratic Party" on Tuesday as he visited New Hampshire.

07/26/2022

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) ripped Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) over his criticisms of the Jan. 6 committee hearings after he admitted he hasn’t actually watched any of them.

Cheney is one of two Republicans who serve on the panel, and she has greatly jeopardized her seat by taking then-President Donald Trump to task over his actions (and inaction) that day.

Appearing on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show on Monday, Cotton tore into the committee investigating the January 2021 Capitol insurrection. In particular, he cited Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s refusal to seat two members nominated to serve on the committee by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

As a result, the House GOP withdrew from the process, and Cheney and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) are the only Republicans on the committee. This happened after Senate Republicans blocked a measure to create an independent and bipartisan commission to examine the insurrection.

“It was clear in Nancy Pelosi’s refusal to seat Jim Jordan and Jim Banks as Republican members of that committee, a break with precedent going back to the beginning of the House of Representatives in the 18th Century,” Cotton told Hewitt. “And I think what you’ve seen over the last few weeks is why Anglo-American jurisprudence going back centuries has found that adversarial inquiry, cross-examination is the best way to get at the truth.”

The panel has held a series of hearings about the role of Trump and members of his inner circle had in inciting the riot.

Later in the interview, Cotton admitted he hasn’t actually watched any of the hearings. He stated he’d only seen “a snippet here or there on the news.”

“I will confess that I did not watch that hearing, and I have not watched any of the hearings, so I’ve not seen any of them out of the context that I see a snippet here or there on the news,” Cotton said.

Cotton’s comments did not go unnoticed by Cheney. On Twitter, she took aim at his reverence for “Anglo-American jurisprudence.”

"Hey SenTomCotton - heard you on hughhewitt criticizing the Jan 6 hearings.

Then you said the strangest thing; you admitted you hadn’t watched any of them.

Here’s a tip: actually watching them before rendering judgment is more consistent with “Anglo-American jurisprudence.”

By Michael Luciano

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) ripped Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) over his criticisms of the Jan. 6 committee after admitting he hasn't actually watched any of them.

04/08/2022

By Dana Milbank, There were even more vermin than usual in Washington this week. A rabid fox at the Capitol bit at least nine people, including Rep. Ami Bera (D-Calif.). And Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison attacked Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) with an insult most entomological.

After Cotton implied that Supreme Court Justice-designate Ketanji Brown Jackson is a N**i sympathizer, Harrison referred to Cotton as a “little maggot-infested man” on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

Fake news! Cotton may go low, but, at 6-foot-5, he is not little. Also, maggots typically feed on dead things, and Cotton, though stiff, is not currently deceased. The man likes to carry on, but he is not carrion.

Harrison went on to censure the Republican Party as a whole: “It is a party built on fraud, fear and fascism.” Interestingly, a statement from the Republican National Committee taking offense at the “maggot-infested” charge did not dispute the “fraud, fear and fascism” formulation. As your self-appointed fact-checker, I have therefore examined the merits of the accusation.

✦ Fraud

Sixteen months after President Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud failed in some 60 court cases, we have finally found evidence of potential voter fraud. Trump’s White House staff chief, Mark Meadows, reportedly registered to vote in 2020 using the address of a mobile home he never lived in. And former Trump State Department official Matt Mowers, a current congressional candidate, voted twice during the 2016 primaries, in New Hampshire and New Jersey.

The “big lie” about a rigged election, accepted by two-thirds of Republican voters, has spawned new frauds about the dangers of coronavirus vaccines (leading to sharply higher death rates in heavily Republican counties) and the promise, touted by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) of the deworming drug ivermectin to treat covid-19; an exhaustive new study finds the drug useless.

Then there are the little everyday frauds. Just days after Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) told the world that his colleagues engage in coke-fueled or**es, Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.) declared at a Trump rally that it was Trump who “caught Osama bin Laden,” record-low unemployment is at a “40-year high” and there weren’t “any wars” during Trump’s presidency. Never mind Syria and Afghanistan.

✦ Fear

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said people like Ketanji Brown Jackson become public defenders because “their heart is with the murderers.” Cotton said Justice Robert H. Jackson “left the Supreme Court to go to Nuremberg and prosecute the case against the N**is. This Judge Jackson might have gone there to defend them.”

Republican senators used the Jackson confirmation to stir fear of minorities and vulnerable groups with manufactured crises about transgender athletes (of the 200,000 participants in women’s collegiate sports, perhaps 50 are transgender) and “critical race theory” (which isn’t taught in public schools).

Ohio Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance released an ad saying “Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans, with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”

Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.), in his latest dalliance with white nationalists, was listed as a “featured guest” at an event on April 20 (Adolf Hitler’s birthday) of a white-nationalist-tied group. His office denies he’ll participate, but Gosar shared details of the event on Instagram, the Arizona Mirror reports.

At a Trump-hosted screening at Mar-a-Lago this week of “Rigged: The Zuckerberg Funded Plot to Defeat Donald Trump,” a poster showed Mark Zuckerberg “devilishly grabbing cash,” The Post’s Josh Dawsey reported. The film repeatedly describes the Jewish billionaire’s money as “Zuckerbucks” — even though the Anti-Defamation League objected to the term as an antisemitic trope about wealthy Jewish control.

✦ Fascism

Sixty-three House Republicans — 30 percent of the caucus — voted against a resolution this week affirming unequivocal support for NATO as authoritarian Russia attacks democratic Ukraine.

A Republican National Committee resolution, never rescinded, refers to the Capitol insurrection not as an authoritarian attempt to overthrow democracy and keep the defeated Trump in power but as “legitimate political discourse.” And Trump expresses regret he didn’t march to the Capitol with the insurrectionists.

Republican-run states are racing to follow Florida’s “don’t say gay” legislation that bans teaching about sexual orientation or gender identity, which follows similar efforts to ban certain teaching about race and history, and widespread efforts to ban books about race, sexuality, gender and police brutality.

The Florida legislature approved an “election crimes” police force for Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), with the potential to intimidate voters, while various GOP-led states move forward with new provisions providing residents with incentives to inform on each other.

The newly-revealed text messages of Justice Clarence Thomas’s activist wife, Ginni, show her sharing with the Trump White House her “hope” that the “Biden crime family” as well as elected officials, bureaucrats and journalists would be taken to “barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.”

Is the GOP “a party built on fraud, fear and fascism”? Certainly, not all Republicans think this way. But too many others are subverting democracy, cavorting with white nationalists, spreading racist fears and fantasizing about extrajudicial punishment for political opponents and the media. For them, the jackboot fits.

Dana Milbank is an opinion columnist for The Washington Post. He sketches the foolish, the fallacious and the felonious in politics.

Fact-checking an entomological insult.

04/06/2022

“You know, the last Judge Jackson left the Supreme Court to go to Nuremberg and prosecute the N**is,” Cotton said, referring to Robert Jackson, who was appointed by President Harry Truman to lead cases against German war criminals. “This Judge Jackson may have gone there to defend them.”

Cotton’s absurd leap echoes a GOP theme dwelling on Jackson’s stint as a public defender representing Guantanamo Bay detainees accused of terrorism. As a public defender, Jackson did not pick her clients.

OK, but while we’re out here playing around with people’s last names in order to make absurd statements, let’s just acknowledge that “Tom Cotton” sounds like every plantation owner in every Mark Twain novel ever. Let’s talk about how Cotton sounds like a white man who uses Black people’s backs as staircases as he walks down to his cotton field, whip in hand, to make sure the n*ggras aren’t slacking in their duties.

Of course, the only difference between my reach and the senator’s is—mine isn’t that much of a reach.

Cotton, after all, has literally defended the institution of slavery as a “necessary evil.”

Go ahead and try to find a quote where Jackson is defending N**is. I’ll wait.

In the meantime, maybe Cotton’s Django Unchained villain sounding-a** should just S**U.

By Zack Linly

As HuffPost reported, on Tuesday, Cotton stood his long-neck-head-a** up during a Senate hearing to use Jackson’s common AF surname to draw the stupidest parallel imaginable in insinuating th…

04/06/2022

Joe Scarborough blasted Senator Tom Cotton for claiming Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson might have defended the N**is at the Nuremberg trials.

On Wednesday, Morning Joe focused on Cotton’s smears against Jackson for legally representing suspected terrorists over the course of her legal career. The senator not only attacked Jackson for arguing — as a defense attorney — that her clients were innocent, he invoked former Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson as he remarked “the last Judge Jackson left the Supreme Court to go Nuremberg and prosecute the case against the N**is. This Judge Jackson might’ve gone there to defend them.”

After saying Cotton’s remarks “made the ghost of Joe McCarthy blush,” Scarborough focused on how Republicans have gone after Jackson for representing Guantanamo Bay detainees in her role as a federal public defender. Scarborough delved into Jackson’s explanation that she doesn’t get to pick cases to which she was assigned and that she was doing the job she was required to do.

From there, Scarborough tore into Cotton, accusing him of “acting stupid” and pretending not to know how this part of the legal system works despite his status as a Harvard-educated lawyer.

"He is twisting this so out of context. It is a wretched display for yet another Ivy League guy. Another Ivy leaguer who went to Harvard Law School, lying to you, acting stupid about what happens when you’re a public defender, what happens when you’re assigned a case. You know why you’re assigned those cases? Because the Constitution of the United States of America, which Republicans like Tom Cotton claim to defend. They carry it around in their pocket, hold up their little pocket-sized Constitutions, but don’t really give a damn about what’s inside of it! Because if Tom Cotton did, he’d understand that she was doing what the Constitution of the United States guarantees every American, that lawyers will do, and that lawyers have done since the beginning of this republic. He knows better. That’s what makes it so absolutely, positively shameful."

Joe Scarborough blasted Senator Tom Cotton for claiming Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson might have defended the N**is at the Nuremberg trials.

04/05/2022

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) railed against Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson on the Senate floor Tuesday and suggested she would have defended the N**is during the Nuremberg trials.

“Judge Jackson has also shown real interest in helping terrorists,” Cotton stated.

“Now, it’s true that you shouldn’t judge a lawyer for being willing to take on an unpopular case,” Cotton said, before doing exactly that. “But you can certainly learn something about a lawyer from the cases they seek out.”

He noted, “Judge Jackson represented four terrorists as a public defender, one of whom she continued to represent in private practice, voluntarily. And she voluntarily filed multiple friend-of-the-court briefs on behalf of terrorists while in private practice.”

Cotton went on to list some of the offenses Jackson’s clients had been accused of, seemingly in a further attempt to discredit her. The senator then expressed apparent shock that a defense attorney would argue her clients are innocent.

“Yet in every case, she claimed that none of them had anything to do with terrorism,” he said. “Not a thing, totally innocent. Just goat herders who were picked up by marauding American troops.”

The senator then referenced former Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who was the lead prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials.

“You know, the last Judge Jackson left the Supreme Court to go Nuremberg and prosecute the case against the N**is,” he said. “This Judge Jackson might’ve gone there to defend them.”

As a Harvard-trained lawyer, Cotton surely knows it is generally poor form to use an attorney’s clients as a cudgel against her, and that this need not be grounds for disqualification from high office.

After all, Harvard alum John Adams defended the British soldiers accused of perpetrating the Boston Massacre.

By Michael Luciano

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) railed against Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson on the Senate floor Tuesday and suggested she would have defended the N**is during the Nuremberg trials. "Judge Jackson has also shown real interest in helping terrorists," Cotton stated. "Now, it's true that you shoul...

03/08/2022

With an ambitious speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on Monday night, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton became the latest Republican presidential aspirant to try and get himself anointed Donald Trump's populist successor. Cotton's remarks were noteworthy primarily for establishing him as a master of obfuscation who will go to almost comical lengths to paper over the party's many disagreements and contradictions.

One way to describe the fissures in the GOP is to contrast Reagan and Trump. The first was sunny and optimistic, a confident defender of democratic ideals who took a strong stand against the Soviet Union while championing immigration, free trade, and limited government at home. The second trafficked in anger and resentment, openly admiring dictators, denigrating NATO, and favoring closed borders and protectionist policies designed to insulate American workers from market forces.

Cotton elided these many differences by claiming that Reagan and Trump belong to the American populist tradition that traces back to President Andrew Jackson. According to Cotton, this tradition is known for proudly and unapologetically defending America's interests in the world — and the interests of ordinary Americans against corrupt economic and political elites.

Cotton then set himself up as the truest successor of the Jacksonian tradition by calling out the biggest mistake made by each of his populist predecessors. Reagan, he claimed, should never have gone along with an immigration amnesty as part of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. As for Trump, his greatest error was supporting and signing the First Step Act, which passed the Senate in 2018 with 87 votes. (Cotton was one of 12 Republicans to oppose the bill.) It was championed by libertarians and widely hailed for its efforts to reform criminal law, sentencing guidelines, and federal prison policy to enhance fairness and reduce the inmate population.

As far as Cotton is concerned, the current surge in violent crime can be traced directly to this law, which supposedly encouraged the hiring of progressive prosecutors who engage in "nullification" by failing to prosecute criminals. The law also resulted in a drop in the prison population by "more than 400,000 inmates in 2020 alone," driven by the "faddish claim that our country has an over-incarceration problem" when in fact "we have an under-incarceration problem."

Combine this diatribe with other passages of the speech denouncing "globalism" and chain migration, calling for presidential medical adviser Anthony Fauci to be fired and "held accountable," denouncing the indoctrination of "our kids with extremist nonsense" in schools, railing against China, and mocking President Biden's appeasement of Russia — and listeners could be forgiven for assuming Cotton's vision of Jacksonian populism amounts to a nastier and more competent version of Trumpism that's also an outright repudiation of Reaganism.

If that's what Tom Cotton wants the Republican Party to stand for, he can certainly try to make it a reality and ride it all the way to the Oval Office. But he should admit the truth that this vision has as little to do with Reagan as it does with Abraham Lincoln, another president Cotton attempted even more absurdly to fold into the Jacksonian tradition. Anything else is deliberate mystification.

By Damon Linker

With an ambitious speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on Monday night, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton became the latest Republican presidential aspirant to try and get himself anointed Donald Trump's populist successor. Cotton's remarks were noteworthy primarily for establishing him as a mast...

03/07/2022

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) in a new interview said former Presidents Trump and Reagan have similar roots in the Republican Party.

“Reagan understood what all Republicans should: We are elected to protect the American people and their prosperity and their freedom,” Cotton, widely seen as a potential future GOP candidate for president, told The Wall Street Journal in an interview.

“Both President Reagan and President Trump, who many people say represent these polar opposites between which we must choose, stood in that tradition,” he added.

Cotton spoke to the Journal before he is set to deliver remarks at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California as part of a speaker series that explores the future of the GOP after Trump lost the election in 2020. He is scheduled to speak at the facility Monday night.

While Trump and Reagan did have a number of similarities — they both worked in the entertainment industry before politics, were members of the Democratic Party before switching to the GOP and secured the Republican nomination after rising above some internal opposition — their stances on trade and immigration differed, the Journal noted. Additionally, Reagan was optimistic while Trump at times describes the country as split and on the wrong path.

Cotton linked GOP’s Trump-Reagan roots to former President Andrew Jackson, who was known for being a populist, according to the Journal. Some advisers reportedly said Jackson was a role model of Trump’s.

“It is the heart of the Republican Party today,” Cotton said. “Republicans are the party of the common man. We stand for law and order, military strength, good jobs, high wages and sanity in our culture wars.”

Cotton has been among the Republican names floated as potential candidates for the 2024 presidential election. He has been a frequent guest on Fox News, criticizing President Trump and his policies, and has also met with Republican leaders in key election states like Iowa and New Hampshire.

Asked about a potential run in the next presidential cycle, Cotton told the Journal “When I turn my attention down the road towards elections, it will indeed first be to 2022.”

“Once that election is over, we can move on to the next election,” he added.

In Monday’s remarks at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California, Cotton is expected to criticize Biden for the unfolding Russian invasion of Ukraine, arguing the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan incentivized Putin, according to excerpts provided to the Journal.

He is expected to say that Russian President Vladimir Putin “wagered that if the American president wouldn’t stand up to a depraved gang of seventh-century savages in Afghanistan, there was no way he would stand up to Russia.”

“After all, Joe Biden had signaled weakness, conciliation and appeasement to Putin from the very beginning,” he will add.

During the interview with the Journal, Cotton criticized Putin when asked if he agreed with Trump’s judgment of the Russian president as “smart.”

“He’s a ruthless dictator and he always has been, and he is responsible for this naked, unprovoked war of aggression,” Cotton told the newspaper.

By Mychael Schnell

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) in a new interview said former Presidents Trump and Reagan have similar roots in the Republican Party.

02/27/2022

Sen. Tom Cotton, a long-standing critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, on Sunday declined to condemn former President Donald Trump for recent comments praising the Russian autocrat.

“I don’t speak on behalf of other politicians. They can all speak for themselves,” the Arkansas Republican told host George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week.”

In discussing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Stephanopoulos repeatedly pressed Cotton for a response to Trump’s recent comments in an interview with “The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show” in which he said Putin’s strategy was “genius” and also said, “Here’s a guy who’s very savvy.” On Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump called Putin “smart,” though he did condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“George,” Cotton told Stephanopoulos, “if you want to know what Donald Trump thinks about Vladimir Putin or any other topic, I’d encourage you to invite him on your show. I don’t speak on behalf of other politicians. They can speak for themselves.”

Stephanopoulos pressed further, telling Cotton he was sure that if Barack Obama or Joe Biden had said similar things, Cotton would readily condemn those remarks. Cotton declined to do so.

“Again, George, if you want to talk to the former president about his views or his message, you can have him on your show,” he said.

For his part, Cotton was not shy about urging that more assistance be provided for Ukraine’s government, as well as denouncing Putin.

“I’m delivering my message to you,” he said,"which I said has been clear, whether Barack Obama is president, whether Donald Trump was president, and now whether Joe Biden was president, that Vladimir Putin has been a ruthless dictator for years. Too many people have not taken the threat seriously. And that’s why you see the images we see in Ukraine now.”

By David Cohen

The Arkansas senator deflected repeated questions about the former president from George Stephanopoulos.

02/17/2022

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) ripped Democrats on Wednesday for supporting the First Step Act, which passed the chamber in 2018 by a vote of 87-12 and was signed into law by then-President Donald Trump. The legislation is a wide-ranging criminal justice reform measure intended to reduce recidivism and incarceration.

Cotton is blocking the confirmations of eight U.S. attorneys because he says the Department of Justice should provide legal defenses for four U.S. marshals who are being sued over actions they took during civil unrest in Portland, Oregon in 2020. One person who filed a lawsuit is a man who was shot in the head with an “impact munition.”

As Cotton delivered his remarks on Senate floor Wednesday, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) seemed taken aback by the Arkansas senator’s framing of the issue.

“It’s your party that voted for in lockstep for the First Step Act that let thousands of violent felons back on the street who have now committed innumerable violent crimes,” said Cotton. “It’s your party who marched and chanted in the streets for defunding the police. It’s the democratic floor leader who blocked my resolution in the summer of 2020 to condemn the defund the police movement.”

As the chair was about to recognize Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), a nonplussed Durbin asked her to yield the floor, which she did.

“The First Step Act?” Durbin said in disbelief. “The Democrats did the First Step Act? The Republicans were in the majority. It was a bill sponsored by Senators Grassley, Durbin, Lee, and many others. And who signed it into law? Donald Trump signed it into law, the so-called Democratic measure.”

After Masto spoke, Cotton addressed Durbin’s comments.

“To respond to the senator from Illinois, yes, it’s true that President Trump signed the First Step Act,” Cotton said. “The First Step Act was the worst mistake of the Trump administration. Yes, it’s true that a number of Republican senators voted for it. They were wrong.”

By Michael Luciano

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) ripped Democrats on Wednesday for supporting the First Step Act, which passed the chamber in 2018 by a vote of 87-12 and was signed into law by then-President Donald Trump. The legislation is a wide-ranging criminal justice reform measure intended to reduce recidivism and inca...

01/15/2022

“Danish intelligence has accused Russia of forging a 2019 letter to Senator Tom Cotton, claiming to be from Greenland's foreign minister & alleging there'd be an independence referendum” — https://twitter.com/juliadavisnews/status/1482183958972575744

12/02/2021

By Jonathan Chait, Republicans have been hammering the Biden administration over inflation. Democrats have tried to respond by blaming supply-chain shortages caused by the pandemic. But Republican senator Tom Cotton has a completely different theory: He blames inflation on Donald Trump’s poor selection to lead the Federal Reserve.

Cotton’s view, laid out in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, places the blame for inflation squarely on Jerome Powell, the Fed’s chairman. “Mr. Powell’s Fed has forced millions of American families to choose whether to pay the mortgage, feed their families, fill up their gas tanks, heat their homes or buy Christmas presents,” he argues.

Cotton makes this case in the course of explaining his forthcoming vote against Powell’s renomination. And obviously, Cotton is not trying to blame Trump (whose name does not appear in his column). But the reason Powell has the job in the first place is that Donald Trump appointed him.

Trump selected Powell in large part because he deemed his predecessor, Janet Yellen, too short to effectively handle monetary policy. Once in office, Powell was an inflation dove, leaving interest rates low in order to run the economy hot. Trump was constantly demanding Powell push interest rates even lower.

Cotton’s view implies that Powell was wrong, and Trump was even more wrong:

"Mr. Powell also maintained the Fed’s radical emergency monetary policies a decade after the end of the 2007–08 financial crisis. The Fed had thereby already exhausted the normal tools of monetary policy when the pandemic hit and was forced to use unprecedented levels of government intervention to prop up the U.S. economy. As a result, the Fed’s balance sheet is nearly $9 trillion and continues to grow by more than $100 billion a month. For perspective, the Fed’s balance sheet barely surpassed $2 trillion after the financial crisis."

Of course, the flip side of elevated inflation levels is that the economy is growing rapidly and unemployment is falling fast. Cotton doesn’t like the trade-off, taking the position that keeping inflation low is the only objective of monetary policy. (“The Fed’s core mission is to ensure stable prices and a sound currency,” he writes, omitting any role for balancing low inflation with low unemployment.)

I happen to think Trump’s preference for low interest rates and a hot economy was correct. Cotton disagrees. But whatever your position on the merits of the Trump-Powell interest-rate regime, Cotton is telling us that inflation levels are Trump’s fault, not Biden’s.

Oops.