Tom Cotton

Tom Cotton (2015)

Thomas Bryant "Tom" Cotton (* 13. May 1977 in Dardanelle , Yell County , Arkansas ) is an American politician of the Republican Party . He has represented the state of Arkansas in the US Senate since 2015 . He was previously a member of the United States House of Representatives since 2013 .

Career

Tom Cotton studied at Harvard University until 1998 and then at Claremont Graduate University in California in 1998 and 1999 . After completing a law degree at Harvard and being admitted to the bar in 2002, he began to work in this profession. In 2002 and 2003 he was a trainee lawyer at the Federal Court of Appeals for the fifth district. Between 2004 and 2009 he served in the US Army . He was deployed in Iraq , among other places . In addition to his work as a lawyer, he is also a business consultant and farmer.

In the congressional election on November 6, 2012 , Cotton was elected in the fourth constituency of Arkansas with 59:37 percent of the vote against State Senator Gene Jeffress in the US House of Representatives in Washington, DC , where he succeeded the no longer running on January 3, 2013 Democrat Mike Ross took office. For the first time since the Reconstruction, all four seats in the state were held by the Republicans.

In 2014, Cotton applied for a seat in the US Senate. In the election on November 4, 2014 , he won against the incumbent Mark Pryor , whom he replaced on January 3, 2015. The term of office is six years; so it runs until January 3, 2021.

Political positions

In March 2015, Cotton caused a sensation as the initiator of a letter to the leadership of Iran . This letter was signed by 47 Republican senators and emphasized the role of the Senate in a possible treaty settlement in the dispute over Iran's nuclear program . This extraordinary action was interpreted as strong criticism of the actions of the Obama administration and was discussed controversially in the media.

Cotton said in 2016 that he did not consider waterboarding to be torture. He supported the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and comprehensive counter-terrorism surveillance in 2017 .

When interviewed by Jeff Sessions in June 2017, Cotton attempted to ridicule allegations of Russian interference.

In February 2020, he repeatedly voiced the conspiracy myth that the COVID-19 pandemic was triggered by a Chinese state laboratory involved in the manufacture of biological weapons.

On the occasion of riots in response to the death of George Floyd , he spoke out on June 1, 2020 in favor of the 101st Airborne Division's action against "anti-fascist terrorists". His guest post in the New York Times was entitled Send In The Troops .

In July 2020, he called slavery in the United States "the necessary evil on which the Union was built".

In August 2020, Cotton, together with Senators Ted Cruz and Ron Johnson, sent the managing directors of Mukran Port Fährhafen Sassnitz GmbH a letter threatening them with massive sanctions due to the Nord Stream project .

Web links

• Web presence at the congress
• Tom Cotton in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Peter Baker: GOP Senators' Letter to Iran About Nuclear Deal Angers White House. In: nytimes.com . March 9, 2015, accessed June 10, 2020 . 
2. ↑ Andreas Ross: Senator's letter to Iran: Constitutional studies for the Ayatollahs. In: faz.net . March 10, 2015, accessed June 10, 2020 . 
3. ↑ Christina Manduley: Sen. Tom Cotton: Waterboarding isn't torture. In: CNN . November 6, 2016, accessed June 10, 2020 . 
4. ^ Cotton Introduces Bill to Extend Key Intelligence Programs. In: senate.gov. June 6, 2017, accessed June 10, 2020 . 
5. ↑ Bob Fredericks: Tom Cotton slams probe of Sessions, Russia as 'spy fiction'. In: New York Post . June 13, 2017, accessed June 10, 2020 . 
6. ↑ Bill Bostock: A GOP senator keeps pushing a thoroughly debunked theory that the Wuhan coronavirus is a leaked Chinese biological weapon gone wrong. In: businessinsider.com . February 17, 2020, accessed on June 10, 2020 . 
7. ↑ Brad Reed: GOP's Tom Cotton calls for 101st Airborne Division to put down 'antifa terrorists'. In: Rawstory.com. June 1, 2020, accessed June 10, 2020 . 
8. ↑ Tom Cotton: Opinion: Send In the Troops. In: nytimes.com. June 3, 2020, accessed June 10, 2020 . 
9. ↑ According to a contribution by Trump advocate: opinion leader of the "New York Times" quits without notice. In: Spiegel Online . June 8, 2020, accessed June 10, 2020 . 
10. ↑ Tom Cotton calls slavery 'necessary evil' in attack on New York Times' 1619 Project . In: The Guardian , July 26, 2020. Retrieved July 27, 2020.
11. ^ Daniel Wetzel: USA threatens German Nord Stream 2 port with economic destruction . welt.de August 5, 2020, accessed on August 8, 2020.