Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) promoted the use of the Insurrection Act against rioters in Los Angeles on Tuesday.
This marked the second time since 2020 that Cotton publicly argued to use the 1807 law, which gives the President of the United States the authority to mobilize the active-duty military within the U.S. in the case of an insurrection. Cotton has already gone on the record to condemn “uncontrolled rioting” that has been going on since Friday night.
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“Is anyone surprised?” Cotton wrote of the Los Angeles riots in an opinion editorial published by the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. “Democrats also stood idly by or even celebrated as the Black Lives Matter riots ransacked our cities five years ago. If anything, these riots are worse. At least the BLM rioters didn’t wave foreign flags. The solution now is the same as I said then: an overwhelming show of force to end the riots.”
Cotton criticized Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass for downplaying the damage caused by rioters while also coming out against the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid that sparked the protests. Both leaders bristled at the arrival of 4,000 National Guardsmen and 700 Marines.
“Mr. Newsom—incompetent and ideological all at once—refused to mobilize the National Guard, leaving Mr. Trump little choice but to federalize the California Guard to protect federal law-enforcement agents and restore order. He has unquestioned legal authority to do so, plus many precedents,” Cotton wrote. “Thus far, Mr. Trump has taken a measured approach and said he doesn’t yet see a need to invoke the Insurrection Act. Let’s hope that the National Guard, federal law enforcement and local police can end the anarchy and restore order to Los Angeles.”
Trump claimed those behind the riots are “paid insurrectionists” and “paid troublemakers.” As president, he promised that as soon as the situation proved to be an insurrection, he would “certainly invoke” the Insurrection Act.
Cotton’s article quoted Los Angeles Police Chief Jim McDonnell from a press conference he held after the third night of riots.
“We are overwhelmed as far as the number of people engaging in this type of activity and the types of things that they’re doing. They’ll take backpacks filled with cinder blocks and hammers, break the blocks, and pass the pieces around to throw at officers and cars, and even at other people,” McDonnell said. “In the past couple of nights, we’ve seen violence at a level that disgusts every good person.”
TOM COTTON CORRECTS RECORD THAT LA PROTESTS WERE ‘PEACEFUL’
After Cotton’s 2020 op-ed in the New York Times arguing to send in the National Guard during the George Floyd protests, there was an outpouring of outrage. Now the article bears a forward that reads, “After publication, this essay met strong criticism from many readers (and many Times colleagues), prompting editors to review the piece and the editing process. Based on that review, we have concluded that the essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published.”
President George H.W. Bush was the last to invoke the law to quell looting in the U.S. Virgin Islands following Hurricane Hugo in 1989, and following the Los Angeles riots in 1992 after the acquittal of police officers who were captured on video beating Rodney King.