Cottoning to Cotton’s idea

At times like these, not that I recall any time quite like this one, the nation needs public officeholders who stake out policy positions that are clear, logical, solid, thoughtful and persuasive.

Stepping on Monday into that breach—and the presidential void— was U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas.

Yes, I mean that one, the often-strident right-wing extremist with a certain coldness in his usual politics.

It has sometimes occurred to me over the years that Cotton’s stridence and unpleasantness grow from strong—if misapplied, I usually think—personal principle. It occurred Monday that his principled conservative ideology might have overlapped with certain principled liberal ideology.

If principles were ever going to overlap, a national emergency would seem to be the sweet spot.

But there’s a key condition: Cotton is embracing this new compassion only to help people who work, not people who don’t or can’t work and who subsist regularly with public assistance.

He would say he remains strongly conservative, and I wouldn’t argue. He would say a working-man populism is now the domain of the Trumpian conservative, especially one already appearing to be running hard for the Republican presidential nomination post-Trump.

The truth is that the best thing we could do right now is park the labels.

Cotton has offered a cogent coronavirus economic relief plan for working people that simply is better than what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin worked up and got passed late last week and sent to the Senate.

He also has gone on Fox News and called for the “extraordinary measure” of a “national shutdown” except for essential services to try to head off being Italy.

In a crisply written and well-reasoned statement issued Monday— though one in which Cotton offered, in full character, a gratuitous “Chinese virus” reference—the state’s junior senator said the Pelosi-Mnuchin measure was well-intended but too complicated and filled with gaps.

Here was Cotton’s argument: Rather than granting paid sick leave for payroll employees but exempting companies with more than 500 employees, and rather than leaving out persons who would be laid off or whose employers simply would go out of business, and rather than casting to the wind these modern independent contractors called “gig workers” who hop around among online entities, Congress should do something even more expensive, as long as it was done right.

He said the right thing was to do away with the middleman and simply send every last-year taxpayer a monthly rebate check or stipend as long as the virus-driven economic crater exists—of an amount he didn’t name, though there’s talk of $1,000 a month individually and $4,000 for a family of four.

He also wants to expand and accelerate unemployment compensation and low-interest loans.

It’s heart-stoppingly expensive, a deficit and debt orgy. But it’s as logical as can be to those accepting the overpowering fact—and nonpartisan one—that this virus is real, and that the smart battle plan against a virus is to hunker in the bunker but keep ourselves fed and sheltered while we are basically pulling the plug on the economy.

Cotton’s statement declared that the country must spend “whatever it takes.”

So, on Tuesday, the Trump administration began talking of an $850 billion stimulus plan that would include new help for working people. It may be that Cotton’s idea could find a place in his president’s followership.

Cotton’s bold truth is especially important in light of these reports that his extreme-conservative base is dubious about what it considers liberal-media hype.

Perhaps those people will listen to him.