Republican Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.) criticized Democrat Evan Bayh on Thursday for skipping hearings on the Senate Armed Services Committee while he was serving on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Cotton, a U.S. Army veteran who is campaigning throughout Indiana with Bayh's Republican opponent Rep. Todd Young, referenced reports that Bayh skipped 76 percent of the committee's hearings during his previous stint in the U.S. Senate.
Cotton said during a meeting with Indiana veterans that Bayh's decision to skip hearings as American troops were deployed abroad shows his "sense of entitlement."
"When I was leading troops in the streets of Baghdad, or the mountains of Afghanistan, Evan Bayh couldn't even be bothered to attend the hearings of the Armed Services Committee," Cotton said during a stop in Indiana. "It just is a sense of entitlement and arrogance."
Cotton further described Bayh as "a man who abandoned Indiana a long time ago, just like he wouldn't stand with our troops in time of war."
Bayh's opponent Todd Young is also a military veteran, actively discharged from the Marine Corp in 2000.
Among the hearings skipped by Bayh was one held on March 20, 2003, the day the United States invaded Iraq, according to a Buzzfeed report. Bayh attended a fundraiser that night and then set out on a three-day trip to Vail, Colorado, according to the report.
The Young campaign has called it appalling that "Bayh was on a plane bound for a personal ski vacation as those same American troops first entered harm’s way in Iraq."