Tom Cotton has gone after Elissa Slotkin the loud way. He wants her off Senate Armed Services, he has a video he keeps introducing as a “Seditious Six” video, and he has an accusation about military funding that he is prepared to repeat until the marble gets tired.
The going-after began in front of cameras, which is Cotton’s preferred lighting. He held up the existence of the clip like a prop and attached his own label to it with no apparent fear of subtlety. Slotkin, he said, belongs in the group he calls the Seditious Six. He said the committee should not have to share a table with that.
Then he got personal, or at least colloquial. “I cringe every time she gets her butt into her chair,” he told a cluster of reporters. He claimed she has been slowing crucial military funding for weeks and that the delay is reason enough to bounce her. “She needs to be removed,” he said. It was not a hesitant sentence.
Slotkin’s first public response lasted about twelve seconds and contained no matching heat. She said Cotton is having a week, she is having a job, and the two are not the same thing. Asked about the nickname, she smiled the small smile of a person who has decided not to help a nickname grow. Asked about the motion, she said he can file what he wants.
That shrug has since become part of the story, which probably delights Cotton and does not appear to bother her. He treats her calm as arrogance. She treats his volume as weather. Aides on her side say she will answer any funding question in committee, on the record, with dates. Aides on his side say the video already answered it.
The clip itself is being asked to do a lot of work. Cotton’s office talks about it as if the pictures were a gavel. Slotkin’s office talks about it as a cut packaged for outrage, stamped with a label Cotton applied and then repeated until it sounded like furniture. People who have watched the longer version say the shorter one does all the political lifting.
Slotkin went to a hearing anyway and sat in the chair that supposedly makes Cotton cringe. She asked questions about shipyards and timelines. She did not mention the hallway. Cotton, later, mentioned the hallway again, because the hallway had cameras and the shipyard discussion did not.
A defense reporter tried to pin down the funding claim with a calendar. Cotton’s team provided a narrative about delay. Slotkin’s team provided a narrative about process and disagreement. The reporter, who has seen this dance, filed a story that made both sides sound sure and the numbers sound slippery. Both sides called the story useful.
Through all of it, Slotkin has declined to play the wounded party. She has called the attack political, called the label cartoonish, and then declined to host a press conference about her feelings. Cotton has declined to take the hint. He says he will keep going until she is off the dais or the public understands why he asked.
The committee remains intact, which is a boring sentence and also the current fact. The motion is filed. The video, under Cotton’s name for it, is still circulating. The funding fight is still an accusation meeting a shrug. If this is a duel, one fighter brought a motion and the other brought a calendar, and both seem prepared to keep their weapons in hand.
Washington will pick a hero if Washington has to. For the moment it has a senator on offense and a senator who will not give him the pleasure of a flinch. Tom Cotton has gone after Elissa Slotkin. Elissa Slotkin has gone back to work. The cameras, inconveniently for nobody, caught both.
