Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent zeroes in on Sen. Tom Cotton in a column on the “colossally stupid” attacks being waged by potential 2024 Republican candidates against Joe Biden’s picks for top administration jobs.

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Case in point: Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas has now debuted a new attack line on Neera Tanden, Biden’s nominee to run the Office of Management and Budget.

Cotton told Fox News that Tanden would rather send relief checks to undocumented immigrants than to American families. This comes after another 2024 Republican hopeful — Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri — attracted widespread scorn for suggesting that Janet Yellen, Biden’s nominee to head the Treasury Department, is simultaneously “corporatist” and driven by “Marxist” impulses.

Sargent says there are legitimate conservative lines of attack, but not “race to the bottom gutter Trumpism.”

He notes Cotton’s appearance on Fox News to say Tanden has no chance of being confirmed. He said, “This is a woman who wants Congress to hold up coronavirus relief to the American people so we can give checks to illegal immigrants.”

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Comments Sargent:

This is highly misleading, and when you understand how, it becomes obvious that it’s basically an attack on Tanden for the sin of … being a mainstream Democrat.

Cotton’s attack echoes an earlier round of GOP attacks on Democrats for blocking a woefully underfunded GOP stimulus bill this fall. Republicans offered a paltry $300 billion — Democrats wanted $2 trillion — and Democrats opposed that offering on numerous grounds, including its lack of direct payments to all individuals, never mind undocumented immigrants.

As a Reuters fact check demonstrated, Democrats did not block this bill due to its failure to send money to the undocumented.

It’s true that House Democrats did pass a $3 trillion bill last spring (the Heroes Act) that made undocumented immigrants eligible for payments. But so what? The mainstream Democratic position, which is shared by the Center for American Progress (which Tanden runs), is indeed that it would be better to include undocumented immigrants.

But this is for good reason: Many are essential workers helping the country weather the coronavirus crisis, and channeling stimulus spending through them as well will help mitigate our economic crisis.

Sargent also says that Cotton, again on Fox News, attacked Yellen by claiming that she presided over a “low-growth, stagnant economy that didn’t create the kind of jobs and wages that working class Americans need.” She chaired the Federal Reserve during the Obama recovery, which was harder than it needed to be Sargent writes because of austerity imposed by Republicans who did all they could to harm the Obama presidency. She was seen as pro-worker in seeking to worry more about the recession and unemployment than inflation.

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There’s plenty of room for debate on policy, Sargent writes, “But it seems likely that conservative populists’ main champions — focused on 2024 — will be more preoccupied with feeding Trumpist impulses by playing to the GOP primary bleachers with crude, bad faith nonsense.”

It worked for Trump. At least in 2016.