Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) joined me this morning to discuss President Biden’s new amnesty executive order:

Audio:

06-18hhs-cotton

Transcript:

HH: Joined now by United States Senator Tom Cotton. Good morning, Senator. Good to have you.

TC: Good morning, Hugh. Great to be back on with you.

HH: I am not going to make you endure another round of ‘what would you do if you were selected as vice president.’ Instead, I’m going to talk about one of the policies former President Trump has put forward – no tax on tips. And I begin by showing the audience and telling the audience that our friend, Derrick Van Orden, Navy SEAL-turned Congressman, just posted a photo. I want to go to dinner with Derrick Van Orden. At least, I want to wait on him. At the Canned Pie restaurant in Milwaukee, he got a receipt for $57.45. He tipped $40 dollars on a $57. You’ve got to go help this guy. He’s from the Navy, obviously. And he wrote, “Vote Trump. No tax on tips.” So first, does Derrick Van Orden need to know something about the right amount of tipping? And second, what do you think about no tax on tips?

TC: It sounds like Derrick was doing a good job campaigning for the President in a critical swing state of Wisconsin. I think President Trump’s proposal to eliminate taxes on tips is a step in the right direction for hard-working Americans who are often struggling to make ends meet in Joe Biden’s America, because they can’t fairly afford to put food on the table for their kids and pay the rent and pay the bills. It also eases a lot of tax administration as well. As you know, Hugh, it’s kind of a nightmare for people who work in service industries to collect tips and report tips and pay the taxes on them. So I think it’s a great way to recognize the hard-working service industry and the generosity of those people who are their customers, get the IRS out of the business of another corner of American life. Meanwhile, you have Joe Biden threatening to raise taxes and giving amnesty to half a million illegal immigrants when we’ve got 14 million illegals into the country because of his failed open border policies.

HH: Now I want to go to that. The executive order is not out, yet, but I have a column about it at Fox News, that it’s illegal what the President is about to do. He does not have statutory authority to grant parole in place to a half million illegal immigrants who have married American citizens. They might be very sympathetic cases, but do you think, you’re the lawyer, and you have a good immigration bill. Do you think he has any claim to statutory authority to do what he’s about to do?

TC: No, of course not, Hugh. Only the Congress can decide who has legal status and who doesn’t have legal status. And the people that he’s going to purport to grant legal status to today are plainly in the country illegally. The President does not have the legal authority to give them legal status. This is at an event, by the way, that’s going to be celebrating when Barack Obama did something similar 12 years ago, building on yet another lawless executive action by Barack Obama with another lawless executive action by Joe Biden. And it kind of gives the lie to a supposedly tough crackdown on the border just two or three weeks ago, which I would call closing the barn door after the horses are out. It’s not even closing the barn door, because it’s still wide open. So I think it just goes to show the kind of chaotic Biden immigration policy that has let 15 million illegals into our country, including rapists and murderers and terrorists.

HH: Now I also, it brings up, the people who argue that Donald Trump is a “threat to democracy”. I think that’s absurd. They also call him authoritarian. That’s even dumber. But the authoritarian is the person who acts on their own authority. That’s what President Biden is doing today, isn’t it?

TC: Hugh, there were numerous cases in the Trump administration in which the President lost at the Supreme Court or at lower courts. He may have groused about it. He may not have liked it. I may not have liked it. In every case, he followed the court’s decision. Contrast that with Joe Biden, who for instance was rebuked totally on his student loan bailout. And what did he do? He didn’t just condemn the Court, but he immediately starting promising how they were going to get around it. And they’ve yet again tried to bail out student loans to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. And you see this pattern repeating itself over and over again with Joe Biden, is that he simply disregards court rulings he doesn’t like in contrast to Donald Trump. So tell me again, Hugh. Who is the threat to democracy – the president who is disregarding Supreme Court decisions and attacking the Supreme Court and trying to imprison his chief political opponent, or Donald Trump?

HH: I agree. It is President Biden. I also want to talk about the disinformation warriors. They are sprinkled across the media. Well, on Saturday night, President Biden had a bad moment on the stage in L.A. And I have watched every version of this that is out there, and the uninterrupted version is the one I’m playing for our Salem News Channel audience. It’s the President, and the music doesn’t break, so you know it’s not edited. There’s background music going on. And he freezes. Former President Obama has to go over and grab him by the arm and then lead him off the stage. That follows the G6 and a half. It’s not worth the G7. It’s the G6 and a half with President Biden there, and the Juneteenth. There’s a problem here. The White House response by saying that’s a ‘cheap fake’, which is a new term. It’s not. What are they doing? Isn’t that disinformation?

TC: Well, Hugh, I mean, I guess the White House strategy and Jill Biden’s strategy is that we’re down to 140 days now or something until the election. If they can just keep President Biden upright and count off the days, maybe they can hang on until the end. But as you say, it’s there for everyone to see. You saw him in Italy at the G7 wandering off aimlessly, which is kind of a good metaphor for American leadership under Joe Biden. And at that event in Hollywood, Hugh, there’s one person who obviously thought Joe Biden needed help and was confused and didn’t know where to go. And that was Barack Obama, because he turned around and took Joe Biden by the arm, and escorted him off the stage. Again, I think it’s a good metaphor…

HH: That’s very well put. I hadn’t heard that.

TC: A good metaphor for the Democratic Party.

HH: There was one person who instantly knew he needed help. I hadn’t heard that before. Senator, I want to talk about the Senate now. You are running for the Senate Republican Conference Chair. There are 10 blue states that could flip. Kari Lake in Arizona, Bernie Moreno in Ohio, Dave McCormick in Pennsylvania. Larry Hogan in Maryland, Mike Rogers in Michigan, Tim Sheehy in Montana, Captain Sam Brown in Nevada, Governor Justice in West Virginia, Eric Hovde, who I do not know and haven’t spoken with, yet, in Wisconsin, and of course, Hung Cao in Virginia, who is on the ballot today. Of these, how many do you think are gettable?

TC: I think every one of those is a winnable seat, Hugh. The American people have decided that they’re ready to turn the page on Joe Biden, because they can barely afford to make ends meet, and they’re sick and tired of terrorists and rapists and murderers entering our country. And the policy of war through weakness, not peace through strength abroad, and another thing that you mentioned, that almost all of those states have in common, is they’re either very strong Republican states for President Trump, or they’re critical swing states for President Trump and Senate candidates are going to be working hand in glove, part of what we discussed last week when President Trump visited with us at Capitol Hill. So in every case, I think you see Republicans on the front foot, on the offensive, whereas Democrats are on the back foot and are scratching, clawing to hang onto what little power they have by their fingernails, or what little path they have to winning in those states, where Joe Biden has to get 270 votes. So I want to stress to your audience that 51 seats is what we need to get the majority and put Chuck Schumer out of work as the Senate leader. But I have ambitions for a much bigger victory than that. And I would encourage all your listeners to look at all those states you mentioned and that you posted on your social media, and consider pitching in a few dollars to each of them, because if a wave comes in, we don’t want to have people who aren’t in the water on their boards.

HH: Oh, that’s true. There could be a wave, and people are afraid of it, because we had red thunderstorms, not a red wave, in 2022 after Dobbs. Senator, of these 10, four are veterans – Dave McCormick is Army, like you, West Point. Tim Sheehy in Montana is Navy, Naval Academy, a SEAL. Captain Sam Brown is West Point, Army, an Army guy like you, and Hung Cao is another Navy SEAL. The veteran population in the United States is 16 million strong. How does Donald Trump get them back, because he lost 7% of that vote between 2016 and 2020, going from 61% of the veteran vote to 54% of the veteran vote in 2020. How do you get them back?

TC: Well, Hugh, the main reason I think veterans are going to swing very hard towards President Trump, even more so than in 2016 and 2020, is what President Biden has done to our military. For four straight years, he’s proposed budgets that cut our military below the rate of inflation that he created. He’s got civilian leaders in the Pentagon who seem more focused on what pronouns soldiers are trained to learn than they are whether or not they’re trained to fight and survive in combat. And it only gets worse the longer you go and the longer the echo of those policies continue. Our veterans know that we need to help our military urgently. We need to grow the military to provide our troops with the weapons that they need to fight and win our nation’s wars, and hopefully, therefore, not have to go into them in the first place. And that we also need strong leaders who will focus on training our troops to win in combat, not training them to be social justice warriors. Our veterans know that Donald Trump will do that.

HH: Now your colleague, Senator Sullivan, was on earlier today. He told me that in the markup of the NDAA, he has proposed changing Nav C, which is an admiral in charge of ship acquisition, to an eight-year term. Boy, that makes sense to me. Does it make sense to you?

TC: I’m open to an idea like that, because we have a crisis in shipbuilding right now. You know, one Chinese shipyard is turning out more ships in a year than all of our shipyards combined. And they have many more times the shipyards that we do. So any kind of creative or novel solution like the one Dan proposed, I think Congress and President Trump need to entertain seriously to ger our shipbuilding industry back on its feet and churning out the ships that we need to deter China.

HH: Last question, Senator. How quickly can we surge shipbuilding capacity? It’s so complicated to contract with the Pentagon. We’ve got a lot of startups. Joe Lonsdale has got a submersible startup, etc. But it takes forever to get contracts from the Pentagon, and then they change them continually.

TC: It does, Hugh, and a lot of that is the Pentagon bureaucracy. Some of that is challenges just in the private sector, you know, supply chain challenges or the lack of skilled workers, because we cut shipbuilding to the bone in the 1990s. You know, if the sun ever sets on America, which I don’t for a minute believe it will, historians will look back to the Defense cuts under Bill Clinton and the supposed peace dividend as one of the critical moments. That’s why it’s so…

HH: Senator, very quickly. You’ve been there for 12 years or 14 years in the House and the Senate? How long?

TC: 10 years in the Senate, two years in the House.

HH: All right, so 12 total. Has anything changed at the Pentagon contracting in that decade-plus of service in the House and the Senate?

TC: Not nearly enough, Hugh. Not nearly enough. You mentioned Joe Lonsdale. He’s a great innovator, as is Alex Karp at Palantir, and Palmer Luckey at Anduril. We need more innovative thinkers like that breaking into the Defense industry, pushing the legacy contractors who are still very important, but we need a more diverse Defense industry.

HH: Senator Cotton, always good to talk to you. Thank you, Senator.

End of interview.