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| Congressman Tom Cotton will speak at Ecclesia College on April 4, at Wallace Auditorium. |
A sixth-generation Arkansan, Tom Cotton was born and raised in Dardanelle on his family’s cattle farm. Tom graduated from Dardanelle High School and went on to graduate with honors from Harvard College and Harvard Law School.
After completing law school, Tom clerked for the U.S. Court of Appeals and then entered private practice, where he concentrated in labor, employment, and constitutional law in cases at all levels of state and federal court.
Yet ever since the September 11 attacks, Tom had felt called to serve his country in uniform, and he ultimately left his law practice to join the Army. Tom declined offers for a direct commission as an Army JAG, volunteering instead to serve as an infantryman. Tom spent five years on active duty. He deployed to Baghdad in 2006 as a platoon leader with the 101st Airborne. In Baghdad, Tom was responsible for a 41-man air-assault infantry platoon and planned and led daily combat patrols.
Following his Iraq deployment, Tom was assigned as a platoon leader at The Old Guard at Arlington National Cemetery, where he was responsible for conducting military honors funerals for veterans from World War II to today’s war. In 2008, Tom volunteered to return to the front lines and deployed to eastern Afghanistan as the operations officer of a provincial reconstruction team, where he planned and resourced daily counterinsurgency and reconstruction operations for an 83-member joint and interagency team.
Tom’s military decorations include the Bronze Star Medal, Ranger Tab, Combat Infantryman Badge, Parachutist Badge, Air Assault Badge, Afghanistan Campaign Medal, and Iraq Campaign Medal.
Following his active-duty service, Tom worked as a management consultant for McKinsey and Company. As a businessman, Tom has advised some of America’s most respected companies on business strategy, operations, finance, and marketing. His industry experience includes agribusiness, health care, oil and gas, food processing, insurance, and aerospace.
Tom has appeared on numerous television and radio programs as an expert with firsthand knowledge of America’s policy in Afghanistan. These appearances include Fox & Friends, Larry King Live, CNN American Morning, The Hugh Hewitt Show, and The Laura Ingraham Show.
Tom resides in Dardanelle, where he enjoys working on the family cattle farm, spending time with his family and friends, and running marathons.
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Congressman Tom Cotton on MSNBC - To Speak at Ecclesia College
The Tea Party may be losing steam and the GOP continuing to find itself in disarray but newly elected Arkansas Republican Rep. Tom Cotton won’t be deterred from his desire to make a change in Washington.
“As I watched the drift in Washington, during the first two years of the Obama administration, I thought again we face a perilous moment,” Cotton told NBC’s Chuck Todd while appearing onThe Daily Rundown. “This time it’s the debt crisis.”
Cotton, a Harvard graduate, and Army veteran, won the vacant seat in Arkansas’ 4th district after the retirement of incumbent Democrat Mike Ross. He won the primary by 20 points with support from the Club for Growth, an advocacy group focused on economic and tax issues.
“When our incumbent congressman announced his retirement I thought that I could perhaps provide some of that leadership here in Washington,” Cotton said. “I wanted to come to Washington and fight for the same freedoms here that I did in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
The congressman quickly became a part of what Politico dubbed the “hell no caucus” but insists that won’t be his primary role.
“I don’t think that will be my role in the Republican conference but I think the Congress as a whole must say a “hell no” to Barack Obama a little bit more,” Cotton said.
Todd asked why Republican congressional members should say no to the president after he easily won a second term in office. Cotton insisted that it’s not about politics but about policy. He remained adamant that Washington’s problems stemmed from “too much spending and too little growth,” insisting that Congress needs a pro-growth solution.
“To get the country back to a balanced budget and to get the economy growing, we don’t need to increase taxes further,” Cotton said. “What we need to do is reduce our spending and enact pro-growth policies to get economic growth back up to three or four percent.”
Stressing his concerns about the upcoming debt ceiling showdown, Cotton said, “We can prioritize payments on a monthly basis to ensure there’s no default [on the sovereign debt] and then we can have the hard negotiations necessary to get spending back under control.”
Cotton is open to compromise as the new Congress begins its first month in office and is especially looking forward to working alongside fellow freshman, Senator Elizabeth Warren, his most “rigorous professor” at Harvard. Mentioning Bill Clinton’s compromises on welfare reform and the balanced budget agreement, he argued that Obama hasn’t acted like his previous predecessors and that needs to change.
