GOP Sen. Tom Cotton tore into Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid for his "bitter, vulgar" remarks and "cancerous leadership" in a withering tirade over a defense bill Wednesday.
"I would never complain about the tasks [that] were given, there is one small burden I bare though," the outspoken Arkansas lawmaker said. "As a junior senator, I preside over 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."
The blast, recorded by C-Span,
was posted by The Daily Caller.
The Senate is beginning debate on a defense policy bill; the House has already passed its own version of legislation that will authorize programs and spending levels for the nation's defense programs and military campaigns.
"Normally, like other Americans, I ignore them. I can't ignore them today, however," Cotton added, before castigating Reid for "grinding the Senate to a halt" to stall the defense legislation that eventually passed 98-0 — and "in committee all the Democrats on the Armed Services Committee voted in favor of it."
"When was the last time the minority leader read a bill? It was probably an electricity bill," Cotton seethed.
"What about the claims it was written in the dark of night? It's been 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," he added.
Cotton then staunchly defended Sen. John McCain, telling Reid, "To say that the senator from Arizona wrote this in the dead of night, slipped in all kinds of provisions, that people don't have time to read it, that is an outrageous slander."
"A man who in April of 2007 came to this very floor before the surge reached its peak and said the war was lost when 100 Americans were being killed in Iraq every month when I was carrying their dead bodies off an airplane at Dover Air Force base. It is an outrage," Cotton, a military veteran, added.
"We're delaying it for one reason and one reason only, to protect his own sad, sorry, legacy."
Concluding his fiery attack, Cotton mocked that Reid "now complains in the mornings that the Senate is not in session enough, that our calendar is too short."
"Well, whatever you think about that, the happy by-product of fewer days in session in the Senate is that this institution will be cursed less with his cancerous leadership," he said.
Reid, who followed the tongue-lashing, held his fire to talk with McCain over the proper procedure of handling the big defense policy bill, then delivered a snide parting show at Cotton, who has just 18 months under his belt in the upper chamber,
Politico reports.
"I think it would distract from what we're doing here today to go into the statements by the very junior senator from Arkansas," he said.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.