Senator Tom Cotton, 37, sparked controversy this week after penning a letter, signed by 46 of his Republican colleagues, to the leaders of Iran. In it, he explained how the U.S. Constitution works. He wrote that any deal with President Obama could be nullified by the next president, and that Congress needs to approve it.
Some have called his meddling “treason.”
Who put the hawkish freshman senator on the map?
Cotton has been helped along the way by some of the richest (or loudest) neoconservative Israel supporters in the U.S.
Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino mogul famous for using his vats of cash to help Israel and the Republicans who support it, gave money to Cotton’s Senate campaign.
Hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer also donated to Cotton’s campaign, to the tune of over $130,000. Singer sits on the board of the Republican Jewish Coalition and donated $3.6 million to a think tank that advocates bombing Iran.
Bill Kristol — the neoconservative columnist who is on the board of the Super PAC Emergency Committee for Israel—has been talking up Cotton for several years. This from a 2013 Weekly Standard article:
“He’s not stale or moss-covered. A combat veteran, he understands real war weariness. But he also understands it needs to be resisted and overcome. Above all, he understands, as did the GOP of old, the GOP of Nixon, Reagan, and Bush, that while we may not be interested in war, our enemies remain interested in us.”
Who is Tom Cotton?
A graduate of Harvard and Harvard Law, Cotton spent almost five years on active duty in the military, including combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It’s no surprise he’s the darling of the neoconservatives—a group that typically embraces vast global military involvement. Cotton advocates a hard line for offensive military actions all over the world.
We’ll leave you with some of Cotton’s most hawkish moments:
“The only problem with Guantanamo Bay is that there are too many empty cells. As far as I’m concerned, every last one of them can rot in hell. But as long as they don’t do that, then they can rot in Guantanamo Bay.”
“We can’t win the war on Islamic terror on defense, we have to win on offense.”
“The more we bomb, if we’re killing terrorists, the safer we are.”
