Junior DeMint
by Tom Sullivan
Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton’s letter to the Iranian government, the one 46 of his GOP colleagues signed, has everyone from NPR to the Wall Street Journal to MoveOn.org talking about the Logan Act. This, in spite of the fact that since its passage in 1799, there have been “no prosecutions under the Act in its more than 200 year history.” The law forbids citizens from interfering with U.S. foreign policy “without authority of the United States.” Whatever that means.
But the controversy must look to his T-party cohort like Tom Cotton’s coup. (Or is that Tom Cotton’s kooks?) “Cotton is a conservative hero, and a crackpot,” reads the Washington Post’s landing page teaser. Paul Waldman writes for the Post’s Plum Line:
On paper, Cotton looks like a dream politician with nowhere to go but up — Iraq veteran, Harvard Law School graduate, the youngest senator at 37. It’s only when you listen to him talk and hear what he believes that you come to realize he’s a complete crackpot. During the 2014 campaign he told voters that the Islamic State was working with Mexican drug cartels and would soon be coming to attack Arkansas. When he was still in the Army he wrote a letter to the New York Times saying that its editors should be “behind bars” because the paper published stories on the Bush administration’s program to disrupt terrorist groups’ finances (which George W. Bush himself had bragged about, but that’s another story).
While in the House in 2013, Cotton introduced an amendment to prosecute the relatives of those who violated sanctions on Iran, saying that his proposed penalties of up to 20 years in prison would “include a spouse and any relative to the third degree,” including “parents, children, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, grandparents, great grandparents, grandkids, great grandkids.” Forget about the fact that the Constitution expressly prohibits “corruption of blood” penalties — just consider that Cotton wanted to take someone who had violated sanctions and imprison their grandchildren. Needless to say, this deranged piece of legislation was too much even for Republicans to stomach, and it went nowhere.
Waldman suggests Cotton is poised to be the next Jim DeMint.
But forgetting about what the Constitution expressly prohibits is just the point for T-partiers like Cotton. Cloaking themselves in it should be enough. What the law actually says doesn’t matter. What matters is what they believe it should say. (I’ve heard this argued in person.) The fact that “God helps those who help themselves” is not in the Bible, for example, is beside the point. It should be. It feels right. And that truthiness is good enough for them. To borrow again from Stephen Colbert, they want to feel the law at you.