Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) blasted Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) in a more than two-minute long screed Wednesday morning over his "cancerous leadership" and his "bitter, vulgar, incoherent ramblings."
In his remarks, noted by the Washington Examiner, Cotton attacked Reid for, as Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) put it, trying to stall a $602 billion defense bill for partisan reasons. The bill passed out of the Senate Wednesday with a 98-0 vote. Cotton, visibly angry, said Reid had ground the Senate to a halt and falsely claimed it was written "in the dead of night."
"As a junior senator, I preside over the Senate," Cotton said. "I usually do in the morning, which means I am forced to listen to the bitter, vulgar, incoherent ramblings of the Minority Leader. Normally, like every other American, I ignore them. I can't ignore them today, however."
Cotton noted all the Democrats on the Armed Service Committee approved the bill.
"When was the last time the Minority Leader read a bill? It was probably an electricity bill," Cotton said. "What about the claims that 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?"
Cotton called Reid's charge that McCain wrote the bill in secret "outrageous slander." The Army veteran also brought up Reid's infamous remarks in 2007 that the Iraq War was lost, even while it was still going on.
"To say that he's delaying this because he cares for the troops, a man who never served himself, a man who in April 2007 came to this very floor before the surge had even reached its peak and said the war is lost, when over 100 Americans were being killed in Iraq every month, when I was carrying their dead bodies off an airplane at Dover Air Force Base," Cotton said. "It is an outrage to say that we had to delay this because he cares for the troops. We are delaying it for one reason and one reason only: to protect his own sad, sorry legacy."
Cotton finished with a flourish.
"He now complains in the mornings that the Senate is not in session enough," he said. "That our calendar is too short. Well, whatever you think about that, the happy byproduct of fewer days in session in the Senate is that this institution will be cursed less with his cancerous leadership. I yield the floor."