Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), who is wrong about most things, inevitably found himself in the tricky position of getting scolded by a small child at an Arkansas town hall meeting on Wednesday night.
“Donald Trump makes Mexicans not important to people who are in Arkansas who like Mexicans, like me and my grandma and all my family,” Toby Smith, age 7, told Cotton to loud cheers from the packed auditorium. “And he’s deleting all the parks and PBS kids just to make a wall. He shouldn’t do that. He shouldn’t.”
After accidentally calling him “Tony” a few times, Cotton ventured a response: “Whatever your background, whatever your heritage, whatever your race or ethnicity or religious belief, part of the fabric of America is that we are a melting pot and we are all one people.”
“Prove it!” someone yelled.
Cotton struggled to finish his statement over the jeers. The senator backed Trump’s Muslim ban, and called the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals “the most notoriously left-wing court in America” after the court refused to reinstate the executive order. He recently introduced legislation that would cut legal immigration to the U.S. in half.
At the same event, attendee Kati McFarland, who suffers from Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, told Cotton: “Without coverage for preexisting conditions, I will die.”
“Will you commit today to replacement protections for those Arkansans like me who will die or lose their quality of life or otherwise be unable to be participating citizens, trying to get their part of the American dream? Will you commit to replacement in the same way that you’ve committed to repeal?” She asked. His answer was predictably unsatisfying:
Another woman told the senator that her husband is dying, and the couple can’t afford higher insurance premiums. “What kind of insurance do you have?” she yelled.
To Sen. Cotton’s minimal credit, he actually showed up to take the beating, unlike many of his colleagues. Marco Rubio, for some reason, is in Europe right now—a safety measure, surely, considering the pack of bloodthirsty seven-year-olds and grandparents and sick people that await him at home.