Tom Cotton
Thomas Bryant Cotton is an American politician and former Army officer serving since 2015 as the junior United States senator from Arkansas. From 2013 to 2015 he served in the U.S. House of Representatives, representing Arkansas's 4th congressional district. He is a member of the Republican Party.
Cotton was elected to the House in 2012 and to the Senate in 2014, defeating incumbent Mark Pryor. He chairs the Senate Republican Conference and the Senate Intelligence Committee. Cotton is known for his hawkish foreign policy views, especially toward China, Iran, and Palestine.
Early life and education
Thomas Bryant Cotton was born on May 13, 1977, in Dardanelle, Arkansas. His father, Thomas Leonard "Len" Cotton, was a district supervisor in the Arkansas Department of Health, and his mother, Avis Cotton, was a schoolteacher who later became principal of their district's middle school. Cotton's family had lived in rural Arkansas for seven generations, and he grew up on his family's cattle farm. He attended Dardanelle High School, where he played on the local and regional basketball teams; standing tall, he was usually required to play center.Cotton was accepted to Harvard College after graduating from high school in 1995. At Harvard, he majored in government and was a member of the editorial board of The Harvard Crimson, often dissenting from the liberal majority. In articles, Cotton addressed what he saw as "sacred cows" such as affirmative action. He was a Claremont Institute Publius Fellow in 1997. He graduated with an A.B. magna cum laude in 1998 after only three years of study. Cotton's senior thesis focused on The Federalist Papers.
After graduating from Harvard College in 1998, Cotton was accepted into a master's program at Claremont Graduate University. He left in 1999, saying that he found academic life "too sedentary", and instead enrolled at Harvard Law School, graduating with his Juris Doctor in 2002.
Career
After graduating from Harvard Law School, Cotton spent one year as a law clerk for Judge Jerry Edwin Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He then went into private practice as an associate at law firms Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and Cooper & Kirk in Washington, D.C., until he enlisted in the U.S. Army in 2005.Military service
On January 11, 2005, Cotton enlisted in the United States Army. He entered Officer Candidate School in March 2005 and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in June. He completed Ranger School, a 62-day small unit tactics and leadership program that earned him the Ranger tab, and Airborne School to earn the Parachutist Badge.In May 2006, Cotton was deployed to Baghdad as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom as a platoon leader with the 101st Airborne Division. In Iraq, he led a 41-man air assault infantry platoon in the 506th Infantry Regiment, and planned and performed daily combat patrols. In December 2006 Cotton was promoted to first lieutenant and reassigned to the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment at Fort Myer in Arlington, Virginia, as a platoon leader.
From October 2008 to July 2009, Cotton was deployed to eastern Afghanistan. He was assigned within the Train Advise Assist Command – East at its Gamberi forward operating base in Laghman Province as the operations officer of a Provincial Reconstruction Team, where he planned daily counter-insurgency and reconstruction operations.
Cotton was honorably discharged in September 2009. During his time in the service, he completed two combat deployments overseas, was awarded a Bronze Star, two Army Commendation Medals, a Combat Infantryman Badge, a Ranger tab, an Afghanistan Campaign Medal, and an Iraq Campaign Medal.
Following his active duty service, Cotton went to work for management consulting firm McKinsey & Company.
In July 2010, Cotton entered the Army Reserve. He was discharged in May 2013.
2006 letter to ''The New York Times''
In June 2006, while stationed in Iraq, Cotton gained public attention after writing an open letter to the editor of The New York Times, asserting three journalists had violated "espionage laws" by publishing an article detailing a classified government program monitoring terrorists' finances. The Times did not publish Cotton's letter, but it was published on Power Line, a conservative blog that had been copied on the email. In the letter, Cotton called for the journalists to be prosecuted for espionage "to the fullest extent of the law" and incarcerated. He accused the newspaper of having "gravely endangered the lives of my soldiers and all other soldiers and innocent Iraqis". Cotton's claims circulated online and were reprinted in full elsewhere. According to Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University in 2011, the Espionage Act has never been used against journalists. Rosen argued that accusing investigative journalists of engaging in espionage is "essentially saying that they're working for another power, or aiding the enemy. That is culture war tactics taken to an extreme."Army Ranger controversy
In 2021, Salon reported that Cotton falsely claimed in campaign ads and videos from 2011 to 2014 that he had served in Iraq and Afghanistan and earned a Bronze Star as a U.S. Army Ranger even though he did not serve in the Army's 75th Ranger Regiment. Fact-checking site Snopes rated Salon's reporting as true. In response to the article, Democratic congressman Jason Crow, who served in the 75th Ranger Regiment, criticized Cotton for calling himself a Ranger. A spokesperson for Cotton said, "To be clear, as he's stated many times, Senator Cotton graduated from Ranger School, earned the Ranger Tab, and served a combat tour with the 101st Airborne, not the 75th Ranger Regiment." As the Salon story garnered widespread attention, Cotton's spokeswoman recommended that the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette talk to retired Command Sergeant Major Rick Merritt, a former regimental sergeant major of the 75th Ranger Regiment, who said that Cotton is "100% a Ranger. He will always be a Ranger. It's unfair. It's almost slanderous."In an article on the controversy, Business Insider wrote, "hile the distinction is rarely brought up outside of military circles, it has been fiercely debated among veterans and encapsulates the nuances of military titles."
Cotton dismissed allegations of falsifying his military record as politically driven. "I graduated from the Ranger School, I wore the Ranger tab in combat with the 101st Airborne in Iraq. This is not about my military record. This is about my politics."
U.S. House of Representatives
Shortly after Cotton's Afghanistan deployment ended, he was introduced to Chris Chocola, a former congressman and the president of Club for Growth, a Republican political action committee that became one of Cotton's top contributors. Cotton considered a run against incumbent Democratic U.S. senator Blanche Lincoln in 2010 but declined due to lack of donors and believing it was premature.Cotton began his campaign for Congress in Arkansas's 4th congressional district in 2011 and had planned to run before Democratic incumbent Mike Ross decided not to seek reelection.
Elections
2012
In September 2011, Arkansas Times editor Max Brantley, criticized Cotton for a 1998 article he wrote in The Harvard Crimson in which he questioned the internet's value as a teaching tool in the classroom, saying the internet had "too many temptations" to be useful in schools and libraries. Cotton later said the internet had matured since he wrote the article.Beth Anne Rankin, the 2010 Republican nominee, and John David Cowart, who was backed by Louisiana businessman and philanthropist Edgar Cason, were the only other Republican candidates in the race after Marcus Richmond dropped out in February 2012. In the May 22 primary, Cotton won the Republican nomination with 57.6% of the vote; Rankin finished second with 37.1%.
The Club for Growth endorsed Cotton. Of the $2.2 million Cotton raised for his campaign, Club for Growth donors accounted for $315,000 and were his largest supporters. Senator John McCain also endorsed him. Cotton was supported by both the Tea Party movement and the Republican establishment.
In the November 6 general election, Cotton defeated state senator Gene Jeffress, 59.5% to 36.7%. He was the second Republican since Reconstruction Era of the United States to represent the 4th district. The first, Jay Dickey, held it from 1993 to 2001, during the presidency of Bill Clinton, whose residence was in the district at the time. On January 3, 2013, Cotton was sworn into the House of Representatives by Speaker John Boehner.
Tenure
As a freshman, Cotton became a vocal opponent of the Obama administration's foreign and domestic policies. He voted for an act to eliminate the 2013 statutory pay adjustment for federal employees, which prevented a 0.5% pay increase for all federal workers from taking effect in February 2013. Cotton voted against the 2013 Farm Bill over concerns about waste and fraud in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, voting later that month to strip funding from that program. He also voted against the revised measure, the Agricultural Act of 2014, which expanded crop insurance and a price floor for rice farmers.Cotton accused Obama of presenting a "false choice" between the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and war. Cotton was also criticized in some media outlets for underestimating what successful military action against Iran would entail. Cotton said, "the president is trying to make you think it would be 150,000 heavy mechanized troops on the ground in the Middle East again as we saw in Iraq. That's simply not the case." Drawing a comparison to President Clinton's actions in 1998 during the Bombing of Iraq, he elaborated: "Several days' air and naval bombing against Iraq's weapons of mass destruction facilities for exactly the same kind of behavior. For interfering with weapons inspectors and for disobeying Security Council resolutions." On July 21, 2015, Cotton and Mike Pompeo claimed to have uncovered the existence of secret side agreements between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency on procedures for inspection and verification of Iran's nuclear activities under the JCPOA. Obama administration officials acknowledged the existence of agreements between Iran and the IAEA on the inspection of sensitive military sites, but denied that they were "secret side deals", calling them standard practice in crafting arms-control pacts and saying the administration had provided information about them to Congress.