The chair of the Democratic Party went on the attack and told voters that the Republican Party’s embrace of “fraud, fear and fascism” should not be rewarded with a return to power in Washington.
DNC chair Jamie Harrison made the comments during an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, taking specific aim at GOP Sen Tom Cotton of Arkansas whose criticism of Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson was widely criticised as cheap and based on a willful misreading of her past work.
A number of Republican senators, including Mr Cotton, went after the judge for her sentencing record in cases of individuals convicted of possessing child sex abuse images; the resulting attacks have led far-right members of the GOP to attack moderates in their own party as “pro-paedophile” for supporting her historic confirmation to the Supreme Court.
He’s “a maggot-infested man” who “doesn’t deserve to be in the US Senate”, Mr Harrison said of Mr Cotton on Morning Joe. Mr Harrison added in a separate tweet: “I’m speaking to a group of preachers in the morning & I can’t say what I would like, but Bless the tiny, mold and maggot infested space where @TomCottonAR’s heart is supposed to be.”
The acerbic comments are indicative of just how deep the divide is between Democrats and far-right Republicans like Mr Cotton who supported the false claims that led to the January 6 attack on Congress and who turned to tactics and attacks many considered to be unfair or misleading during the Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmation hearings.
The Democratic Party chair had little warmth for the rest of the Republican Party either. He declared on MSNBC: “It is a party built on fraud, fear and fascism. They don’t deserve to be in power.”
Mr Harrison took over the Democratic Party after a bruising loss to Sen Lindsey Graham in the state’s US Senate election in 2020. He now faces the prospect of rebuilding the party, which lags the RNC in fundraising and is considered to have lost its effectiveness at the state level, where the party sometimes fails to find candidates for lower-level races. The party lost control of two dozen state legislatures during the Obama presidency, along with other devastating setbacks at the state and local levels.
Democrats now face the prospect of losing one or both houses of Congress in this November’s midterm elections, a worrying prospect for the left which would likely see the end of President Joe Biden’s ability to pass most if not all meaningful policy-based legislation were that to occur.
