El Dorado News-Times - Cotton Hears From Constituents Over Coffee

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By David Showers

Approbation abounded during Saturday morning's coffee klatch at the El Dorado Conference Center Bistro, where constituents commended U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton for voting to sever the food stamp program from the farm bill and repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Cotton's constituent advocate and El Dorado office manager said 43 people availed themselves of the chance to bend the congressman's ear during Saturday's "Coffee with your Congressman" event. But not everyone was in lockstep with the freshman House member's conservative tack.

"There was one lady who wanted to talk about Obamacare," Cotton said as his handlers were whisking him away to a similar appearance in Magnolia. "She thought it would lead to expanded healthcare and more options for people. We had a healthy debate about the kind of incentives the law creates that will not result in that, but just result in more taxes, more spending and more regulation and take more choices out of the hands of patients and doctors and put them in the hands of bureaucrats."

Cotton joined with fellow House Republicans in May for a 229-195 vote to repeal the federal healthcare law, marking the 37th time the Republican-controlled House voted to rescind the law. The measure has yet to be taken up by the Democratically-controlled Senate.

Cotton called the law "abominable" during his remarks from the House floor and urged voters to "throw out of office" every politician who voted for it three years ago. He said the administration's decision to delay the law's employer-mandate provision proves the broader legislation its too unwieldy to be enacted. The law had called for businesses with the equivalent of 50 or more full-time employees to offer health benefits by Jan. 1 or pay fines. The deadline has since been extended to January 2015.

"The implementation is not going well," Cotton said Saturday. "I don't think it will ever go well. The law is economically irrational, and Congress can no more repeal the laws of economics than they can repeal the laws of gravity."

Earlier this week Cotton voted to remove food stamp funding from the farm bill, joining 215 other Republicans in passing the measure without a single Democratic vote. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps, has been included in the farm bill since 1973.

Cotton was the state's only House member to vote against the farm bill last month, citing his objection to the food stamp inclusion. He said the constituents he spoke with Saturday agreed the food stamp appropriation should stand on its own.

"That's been a reform that's been 40 years in coming," he said. "I say it's a historic reform, and a lot of folks in there were just really happy we were able to stop that kind of business-as-usual Washington politics and logrolling, so we can consider programs on their own merits and whether or not they're good."

Like the House's vote to repeal the healthcare law, its version of the farm bill is also unlikely to be considered by the Senate. The current farm bill expires Sept. 30.

This morning on NBC's "Meet the Press" Cotton will weigh in on the bipartisan Schumer-Rubio immigration bill that recently emerged from the Senate. He was critical of it in the Op-Ed he wrote earlier this week in the Wall Street Journal, saying it gives short shrift to border enforcement while providing only "trivial preconditions" for legalization of immigrants.

"People are concerned not only about the Senate bill, but the Senate approach to the problem, which is to grant amnesty first and have enforcement later," he said Saturday. "...But we'll never get the enforcement, because future Congresses will defund it, the president won't enforce it and opponents will sue in court to block it."

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