Chair of the Imbecile Caucus: Sen. Tom Cotton Proudly Stands at the Vanguard of Shameless Republican Obstructionism @alternet:
"the story of Cassandra Butts, a graduate of Harvard Law School and longtime friend of President Obama who had served as Deputy White House Counsel early in his administration. In February of 2014, the president nominated Butts to be the ambassador to the Bahamas. In keeping with their tradition of saying no to everything Obama proposes, Republicans in the Senate put a hold on Butts’ confirmation. She was still waiting for them to lift it when she died two weeks ago after a short bout with leukemia. The senator behind the hold was Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who has predicated his entire brief Senate career on being an irredeemable dickhead. According to Bruni, Butts once went to Cotton to ask why he wouldn’t lift the hold on her nomination. [H]e explained that he knew that she was a close friend of Obama’s—the two first encountered each other on a line for financial-aid forms at Harvard Law School, where they were classmates—and that blocking her was a way to inflict special pain on the president. Cotton’s spokeswoman did not dispute Butts’s characterization of that meeting, and stressed, in separate emails, that Cotton had enormous respect for her and her career. That’s nice of him. Maybe Cotton can eulogize Butts at her funeral. Seems like the least he could do after keeping her twisting in the wind for over two years—835 days, to be exact—just because he wanted to “inflict special pain” on President Obama."
