Editor's note: A version of this column was first published online Wednesday at arkansasonline.com.
Until now, one always had to concede that at least Tom Cotton was admirably principled. He voted his economically libertarian and anti-government beliefs, like them or not. And he owned up to voting for those principles.
But now, alas, he has abandoned that laudable personal underpinning. He has retreated to garden-variety politics as usual.
He has done so in the matter of the Arkansas Children's Hospital.
He voted against money for the hospital but won't admit it. Thus he obfuscates in the style of any other politician.
The Cotton described in the first paragraph would say that, yes, he stands guilty as charged in a Democratic attack ad.
Alone in the Arkansas congressional delegation, he voted in February 2013 against an appropriation to re-up $330 million for graduate medical education at stand-alone children's hospitals.
The Cotton described in the first paragraph would say the federal government is broke and that popular discretionary spending must be eliminated. He would say he adores the Arkansas Children's Hospital but that tough cuts must be made. He would say the cut was but a small fraction of the local hospital's budget.
He would say the hospital could find another way to come up with $6.4 million or thereabouts for a graduate medical education program to develop pediatric specialists.
But the Cotton of the first paragraph has given way to the Cotton of the second paragraph.
This Children's Hospital matter has put him off-balance from the beginning.
In April 2013, his office concocted that he voted against the $330 million appropriation because of a procedural failing--that the bill had not properly been through committee. But it had been.
So now the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, in a television commercial, assaults Cotton for the negative vote. And he replies that, in fact, he favored the Children's Hospital money all along.
But he didn't.
In yet more politics as usual, he tries to turn the issue back on Mark Pryor by faulting Pryor for sequestration cuts, including to children's hospitals.
Pryor went along with across-the-board sequestration cuts to acquiesce to a deal to keep the country from defaulting on its debt. On other occasions, Cotton has said the sequestration cuts were appropriate and not onerous.
Cotton's assertion of having voted in favor of Children's Hospital relies on roll calls taken, not to make law in good faith, but merely to provide political protection.
Cotton says he voted five times for the Arkansas Children's Hospital. Most were on broad budget bills that had no chance of passage. Republicans brought them up merely so they could get on record that they voted for budgets from which money for the Affordable Care Act had been excised.
The eventual effect of that kind of game-playing was to shut down the government.
Now Cotton wants credit for voting for the Arkansas Children's Hospital in part because he eventually yielded to a torrent of well-deserved criticism. That is to say he voted in the end to re-open the government--the government that he and his overzealous right-wing allies shut down in the first place.
The fact is that there was one roll-call vote in the House, occurring in February 2013, specifically to reauthorize the $330 million for children's hospitals. The fact is that it passed overwhelmingly, 352-50.
The fact is that Cotton was in the 50. The fact is that the other three Republican House members from Arkansas were in the 352.
In one of the more disingenuous assertions of the season, Cotton says that Arkansas Children's Hospital lost not one cent because of any vote he cast. That's because he was in the 50. He is taking credit for losing.
The fact is that the appropriation was opposed by the Club for Growth. That is the extreme right-wing group--economically libertarian, pro-billionaire and anti-government--that seeks draconian reductions in government.
Notably, it is the group that loaded up the agreeable Cotton with bundled campaign contributions when he ran for Congress in 2012.
The Club for Growth says we need a new Washington filled with Ted Cruzes and Tom Cottons.
So it appears that Arkansas voters must answer three questions:
One is whether they want to install in the Senate someone equated with Ted Cruz.
The second is whether they want to install in the Senate a man obliging a group like the Club for Growth.
The third is whether they can trust the declared principles of a candidate who casts those principles aside when the heat gets turned up in electoral battle.
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 08/17/2014