Ebola, ISIS, and God were topics at Cotton rally in Fort Smith

U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton, R-Dardanelle, brought his campaign for the U.S. Senate to Fort Smith Thursday (Oct. 9), bringing a familiar Arkansas native with him in an attempt to drum up support with less than a month away from the general election Nov. 4 and polls continuing to show a tight race.

Before a rally featuring former Gov. Mike Huckabee, R-Ark., Cotton spoke about issues both nationally and locally drawing attention in the final days of the campaign. His visit came on the same day he and his wife Anna announced they were expecting a baby boy in April 2015.

The death of ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan in Dallas on Wednesday (Oct. 8), the first ebola patient to die in the United States, brought Cotton's focus back to a commercial aired by U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., attacking Cotton's record on emergency preparedness during his single term in Congress.

Cotton called the commercial "silly" and said Pryor and President Barack Obama were not taking the threat of an ebola epidemic seriously.

"Ebola is a very serious matter. Mark Pryor's silly commercial is not serious and he and Barack Obama, I don't think, are taking it seriously enough. Obviously Americans should be proud of the fact that we are the one country that everyone in the world looks to to help counteract an outbreak like this. And we have troops and physicians and epidemiologists on the ground in west Africa. Russia doesn't, China doesn't. Everybody looks to America and we should be proud of that. And we should try to stop this outbreak in its tracks in west Africa."

How to do that and protect Americans, Cotton said, includes placing travel restrictions on nations seeing the highest cases of ebola, including Liberia.

In a statement, Pryor spokesman Grant Herring said, "Congressman Cotton has zero credibility on this serious issue after he was the only member of Congress from Arkansas, Republican or Democrat, to vote against adequate funding for the Center for Disease Control and emergency pandemic response programs."

Cotton also addressed the fight between the United States and its allies against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. He said the United States should have left a troop presence in Iraq following the end of the Iraq War and said Obama disregarded "the advice of generals."

"They are beheading Americans and crucifying Christians and they have ambitions to strike Americans, not just in Middle East but right here in the United States, as well. So the president needs to be fully engaged and committed to victory, not just using pinprick airstrikes that don't the kind of volume or lethality that we need," Cotton said.

ROADS AND MARRIAGE
On the local issue of infrastructure funding for projects like Interstate 49 completion across the Arkansas River and dredging the Arkansas River to create a 12 foot channel, Cotton said it was time to remove Washington politics from the issue.

Earlier in the week, House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Bill Shuster, R-Penn., was in the region reviewing infrastructure needs and said he was working on a surface transportation bill that would address 40 different corridors across the country including I-49, but would also add money to the bankrupt federal Highway Trust Fund. He said states like Arkansas that pump more money into infrastructure projects were likely to see more attention from the federal government.

Cotton said he was in favor of having states and local government invest more of their own money into projects and further added that he would work on making sure the trust fund was limited to just highway maintenance and construction, versus other items that he said it has been used for in the past.

"Sixty years ago when we were building an interstate grid system, it required a heavy role for federal involvement. But now, when you're talking about essentially regional projects like I-49, or even projects that affect a few counties here in Arkansas yet are funded by our gas tax, too often Washington bureaucrats are slowing it down. … A lot of that money should be turned back to the states in a pass-through mechanism so they can decide what's best for their citizens. … I also think we need to get the Highway Trust Fund back to being a highway trust fund. We need to build roads and bridges. We don't need our dollars being spent to build subways or light rail or to beautify the sides of highways with flower beds. All those things may be great projects that local communities or states want to engage in, but they don't help us here in Arkansas. Here in Arkansas, we need roads and we need bridges and our highway money should be going to support that, not going to support local projects like subways."

Cotton said he would take "under serious consideration" an amendment to the Constitution that U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has proposed that would allow states to make its own rules regarding marriage and therefore stop courts from ruling gay marriage bans unconstitutional. The proposed amendment comes the same week the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear appeals to the overturning of five gay marriage bans in various states. One of the overturned bans was in Oklahoma, which lay less than a mile across the Arkansas River from Cotton's Thursday rally.

"I haven't seen the language of the amendment. I would review it. I would certainly take it under serious consideration because I don't think anybody at the founding or in the 19th century when we adopted the 14th Amendment believed that there was a Constitutional right to protect same-sex marriage. Marriage has throughout our history been a matter for state laws," he said.

‘SOIL OF THIS STATE’
Introducing Cotton at the rally at the Fort Smith Museum of History early Thursday afternoon, Boozman took an opportunity to encourage the crowd to not have apathy on Nov. 4 about the election.

"When you look at the history in the mid-term elections, a lot of people — even the people who are registered — don't go vote. So the key is us getting on the phone, getting the votes out … in a personal way saying, 'I'm going to take you.' If we'll do that, then Tom Cotton's going to be the next senator from Arkansas and as I said earlier, the first vote that he casts will be to get rid of Harry Reid."

The theme throughout Cotton's speech to the crowd of about 250 people was to "retire Pryor."

Huckabee, who served as Arkansas governor from 1996 to 2007, said electing Cotton was the only way to not only retire Pryor, but also retire the policies of the Obama administration.

"You've got the kind of person who when he goes to Washington will know who he is, where he comes from and will vote the kind of values that you sent him there to represent. He's one of us. He's somebody who comes from the soil of this state,” Huckabee said.

He finished by saying Cotton will stand for Christian values if elected to the Senate and said America had fallen out of favor with God.

"For the first time, people believe the prosperity that they enjoyed will not be shared by their children and grandchildren. Folks, America can't continue to have a population that does not have hope and optimism for its future. And the reason we've lost that is because we've turned our backs on God and we've turned our backs on our Constitution and we need to get people like Tom Cotton who once again represent what makes this country great and will never be sorry for it."