A noted fact-checker is among those criticizing U.S. Senator Tom Cotton after the Arkansas Republican was caught lambasting President Joe Biden’s COVID relief bill that will send a check to the “Boston Bomber.”
Cotton, in a multi-day rant, attacked Democrats and President Biden’s American Rescue Plan that no Republican in the Senate voted for at all – Republicans in the midst of a year-long pandemic voted to not give any help to the American people. The bill, like the two Trump-era bills before it, does not exclude people in prison. As many on social media noted people in prison also have families and are also affected by the pandemic.
The Senator from Arkansas, who has 2024 presidential ambitions, posted tweets like these pointing out, in the most extreme manner possible, that prisoners will be getting checks.
Cotton, as CNN’s Daniel Dale and others have noted, did not vote for Biden’s relief bill but he did vote, twice, for President Donald Trump’s COVID relief bills, which also sent checks to those who are incarcerated.
He then tried to blame a “liberal” federal judge for prisoners receiving checks.
“They’re saying, ‘CARES—which passed unanimously—also sent checks to prisoners.’ But they’re leaving out that this is only because a liberal federal judge mandated it over the government’s objections, *months after the bill passed.*”
Dale was not letting that go by unchallenged.
“Nope,” the CNN fact checker tweeted. “Prisoners got checks from the Trump-signed, Cotton-backed CARES Act *because nothing in the law said prisoners shouldn’t get checks.* Post-signing, the IRS declared No Prisoners Allowed. The judge overturned the IRS because the law didn’t say that.”
Cotton then again went ballistic with another “Boston Bomber” tweet attacking Democrats.
And other “murderers.”
“Cotton’s attack on Democrats was echoed by North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn on Twitter on Sunday,” Dale writes at CNN. “Fox News, meanwhile, turned Cotton’s tweets into an ominous headline on the front page of its website: ‘FUNDING CONVICTED KILLERS. Democratic COVID bill gives mass murderers taxpayer money right out of your pocket.'”
It did not go well for him.