Sen. Tom Cotton on Wednesday said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid’s leadership in the Senate is “cancerous,” and blasted Reid on the Senate floor for spewing “bitter” ramblings against Republicans.
“As a junior senator, I preside over the Senate,” the Arkansas Republican said, noting his occassional duty of holding the gavel in the Senate. “I usually do in the morning, which means I’m forced to listen to the bitter, vulgar, incoherent ramblings of the Minority Leader. Normally, like other Americans, I ignore them. I can’t ignore them today, however.”
Cotton was angry over Reid’s attempt to halt a vote on a defense policy bill that eventually passed in a 98-0 vote Wednesday morning.
“When was the last time the minority leader read a bill? It was probably an electricity bill,” Cotton asked.
Reid had accused the GOP of crating the 1,664-page bill in the “dead of the night,” leaving lawmakers unable to figure out what was in it. The bill, Cotton argued, has been in “public for weeks.”
“And this coming from a man who drafted Obamacare in his office and rammed it through this Senate at midnight on Christmas Eve on a straight party-line vote?” Cotton continued before coming to the defense of Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, who criticized Reid for trying to “stall” his defense bill “for pure partisan reasons.”
Reid also said he stalled the bill “for the troops.”
“To say that he’s delaying this because he cares for the troops, a man who never served himself, a man who in April 2007 came to this very floor before the surge had even reached its peak and said the war was lost, when over 100 Americans were being killed in Iraq every month, when I was carrying their dead bodies off an airplane at Dover Air Force Base,” added Cotton, a military veteran.
Reid delayed the vote, according to Cotton, in the interest of saving his “sad, sorry legacy … the happy by-product of fewer days in session in the Senate is that this institution will be cursed less with his cancerous leadership.”
