Sen. Tom Cotton

Tom Cotton, Marsha Blackburn Plan Ends China-to-U.S. Student Visa Pipeline

Senators Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) are looking to end China’s pipeline of foreign students to fill spots at American universities and take American STEM jobs. In the wake of the Chinese coronavirus crisis, Cotton and Blackburn — as well as Rep. David Kustoff (R-TN) in the House — have filed legislation called the SECURE CAMPUS Act that ends the China-to-United States pipeline of Chinese nationals receiving student visas for STEM fields. “The Chinese Communist Party has long used American universities to conduct espionage on the United States,” Cotton said in a statement. “What’s worse is that their efforts exploit gaps in current law. It’s time for that to end.” In short, Cotton and Blackburn’s plan would: Ban Chinese nationals from receiving student visas to the U.S. for STEM fields Ban Chinese nationals from working on federal R&D grants in STEM fields Require universities, labs, and research institutes recieving federal taxpayer money to confirm that they will not knowingly employ participants in China’s foreign talent recruitment programs Require China’s foreign talent recruitment program participants to register as foreign agents Require the State Department to publish a list of China’s foreign talent recruitment programs Blackburn said in a statement: ” Beijing exploits student and research visas to steal science, technology, engineering, and manufacturing secrets from U.S. academic and research institutions. We’ve fed China’s innovation drought with American ingenuity and taxpayer dollars for too long; it’s time to secure the U.S. research enterprise against [China’s] economic espionage.” As Breitbart News has chronicled, the U.S. legal immigration system remains hugely beneficial to China. From 2008 to 2018, more than 825,000 Chinese nationals arrived in the U.S. on green cards — an immigration status that provides them with permanent residency, a pathway to American citizenship, and eventually the ability to bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country through the process known as “chain migration.” There are nearly 500,000 Chinese students in the U.S. in any given year — more than any other country — taking seats in university classrooms and looking to eventually obtain Optional Practical Training (OPT) visas to take entry-level jobs in white-collar professions. In Fiscal Year 2019, alone, Chinese nationals secured about 170,000 F, J, and M visas to arrive in the U.S. as students — more than any other country in the world.

And it needs to end.  It’s ridiculous!  Major kudos to Sens. Cotton and Blackburn for spearheading this effort.  Let’s hope it turns into a bill, and then into law.  Excellent!!    🙂

Cotton Warns Against China Trying to Steal Coronavirus Vaccine from U.S., Urges ‘Hard Look’ at Visas Granted to Chinese Nationals

Sunday, during an appearance on Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) said, based on the past, the Chinese government was likely still attempting to steal intellectual property from the United States, including a coronavirus vaccine. “[T]he Chinese Communist Party has been stealing America’s intellectual property for decades, and they aren’t going to magically stop in the middle of a pandemic,” he said. “In almost every state in the union, there are active cases against Chinese nationals. In Arkansas, for instance, they are accused of having stolen proprietary genomes of our farmers in East Arkansas. But in the middle of a pandemic, what’s the most valuable intellectual property in the world? It’s the research that our great laboratories and life science companies are doing on prophylactic drugs, therapeutic drugs, and ultimately a vaccine. So I have little doubt that the Chinese intelligence services are actively trying to steal America’s intellectual property as it relates to the virus that they unleashed on the world, because, of course, they want to be the country that claims credit for finding those drugs or finding a vaccine, and then use it as leverage against the rest of the world.” Cotton told FNC’s Maria Bartiromo a “very hard look” should be taken at Chinese Nationals coming to the United States to study in specific fields. “[I]t’s a scandal to me that we have trained so many of the Chinese Communist Party’s brightest minds to go back to China to compete for our jobs, to take our business, and ultimately to steal our property and design weapons and other devices that can be used against the American people. So, I think we need to take a very hard look at the visas that we give the Chinese nationals to come to the United States to study, especially at the post-graduate level in advanced scientific and technological fields. If Chinese students want to come here and study Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers, that’s what they need to learn from America. They don’t need to learn quantum computing and artificial intelligence from America.”

Agreed!!!!   The good Senator from the great state of Arkansas is exactly right!  Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR)  is a former Army infantry officer who was awarded the Bronze Star, as well as the Combat Infantryman’s Badge (CIB),  for his service in Iraq.  So, he’s a guy who’s been there and done that…and oh, btw.. he also has a law degree from Harvard.   We can no longer afford to play nice and be politically correct.  We can no longer afford to be suckers and let the Communist Chinese Party (CCP) to walk all over us because we’re too afraid to be called “racists” and “xenophobes” by the likes of Jim Acosta over at CNN.

Sen. Tom Cotton: ‘It’s crazy’ that we depend on ‘an enemy of the United States’ for ‘basic pharmaceuticals’

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said Wednesday that the coronavirus pandemic underscores the importance of securing America’s medical supply chain and ramping up production of life-saving medicines to end the long-time reliance on the Chinese government. “The Chinese Communist Party unleashed this plague on the world that turned what could have been a local health problem in Wuhan into a global pandemic,” Cotton told “Hannity.” Wednesday. “But,” he continued, “that’s exactly what the Chinese Communist Party has always done. It’s dishonest, it’s corrupt, and it’s an enemy of the United States.” The spread of the virus has highlighted some experts’ long-held worries about U.S. “over-reliance” on Chinese pharmaceutical production. America essentially ceased domestic production of penicillin in around 2004 — a move which was applauded as a way to save money on generic drugs, but has been the source of much concern in recent years. “It’s one thing to have jobs that make lawn chairs or toy trinkets in China. It’s another thing to make basic pharmaceuticals that we need, like antibiotics or penicillin, buprofen, advil. It’s crazy that we are dependent upon China, a country that at this very moment is still threatening to withhold those critical medical supplies from the United States.,” Cotton said. “That’s why it has to end and we have to bring the pharmaceutical manufacturing capability back to the United States.”

Agreed 100%!!  Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) is exactly right here.  For more, scroll down and read the following article, which gives Sen. Cotton’s position some historical context.

Opinion/Analysis: Sen. Tom Cotton’s Idea to Insource U.S. Pharmaceuticals Echoes One of Our Great Successes in World War Two

America First—Finally Much good can come out of World War V (“V” for “Virus,” in the coinage of Silicon Valley techie Balaji Srinivasan). Yes, we will mourn the loss of life, yes, we will regret the personal and social disruption, and yes, we will have to work hard to restore our economic vitality. And we’ll have to work even harder to restore a proper sense of justice in this country, where the heroes of World War V—the “thin white line,” as well as others who fought to save us—receive a larger share of the rewards and benefits than they have heretofore. We can do all these things, and more, if we follow the right vision and the right leadership. Indeed, history shows that we can come back stronger than ever—but only if we make the right moves. For instance, we can start by moving to reclaim our health supply chains from their current dependence—that is, their end points in the People’s Republic of China. It was foolish, in the extreme, for past White Houses and Congresses to let American health companies outsource their production to China. And yet that’s exactly what happened, while Washington, DC, was focused on various Middle Eastern follies. As a result, today, the U.S. makes pitifully little of what it truly needs—and that’s why we are confronted with humiliating headlines such as this, seen in the March 13 New York Times: “The World Needs Masks. China Makes Them—But Has Been Hoarding Them.” As the article detailed: ” China made half the world’s masks before the coronavirus emerged there, and it has expanded production nearly 12-fold since then. But it has claimed mask factory output for itself. Purchases and donations also brought China a big chunk of the world’s supply from elsewhere.” The Times is too polite to come out and say so, but it seems obvious that the Chinese are trying to corner the market on protective face masks—leaving us to wonder why. Yet now finally, after 30 years of globalist sleepwalking under both Democrats and Republicans, America is starting to wake up. And two of the leading Wide Awakes are Sen. Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, and Rep. Mike Gallagher, Republican of Wisconsin; they have jointly put forth a bill in Congress: The Protecting our Pharmaceutical Supply Chain from China Act. On March 25, Cotton and Gallagher published an op-ed in which they declared, “Our bill would require federal entities like the Department of Defense, VA hospitals, Medicare and Medicaid to cut off purchases of drugs with Chinese ingredients no later than 2025”—with the idea being that if those huge purchasers of medicines phased out their China purchases, the rest of the U.S. market would follow. In other words, American would independent of China, the country whose propaganda ministry recently crowed that we would “sink into the hell of the novel coronavirus.” In other words, Red China is exactly the sort of country we should not be relying on—for anything. Still, the Cotton-Gallagher legislation is so upsetting to the globalist order that we should expect half the lobbyists in D.C. to oppose the bill. And yet the problem of our dependence on Big Panda is so severe that it’s likely that the goals of Cotton and Gallagher will be realized, one way or another, soon enough. To be sure, from the point of view of a well-fed incumbent politician, it’s certainly nice to be funded and lunched by lobbyists and PACs working for globalist clients—and yet for the individual pol, it’s actually nicer to get re-elected. And that suggests movement in the direction pointed to by Cotton and Gallagher. That is, in light of the gathering crises over both corona and China, few politicians will wish to be seen as in the pocket of either the corporate outsourcers or of the Chinese. According to Cotton and Gallagher, the problem is this: ” Today, most active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) used for drugs in the United States are made in China, including 95% of U.S. imports of ibuprofen, 70% of acetaminophen, and 40-45% of penicillin.” Of this litany of outsourced health necessities, the most poignant is penicillin. It was, after all, penicillin that helped us win World War Two. So if we see the Good War as the still-abiding moral heart of the modern-day worker-soldier-first-responder coalition—and we rightly should—then we must study our successes in World War Two, seeking to emulate them whenever possible.

Agreed!!  And well said, James.  James P. Pinkerton is the author of this sobering article.  Click on the text above for more.  Thanks James!     🙂

Sen. Tom Cotton: Gina Haspel has spent her life defending our country. She’s an excellent choice for CIA

President Trump’s nominee for CIA director, Gina Haspel, is set to appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday. As a strong supporter of her nomination, I expect she will do very well. Despite her opponents’ attempts to paint her as an ideological zealot, Haspel is a consummate professional whose record of accomplishment, bipartisan support, and clear love of country make her an excellent choice to lead our nation’s top intelligence agency. Unlike many nominees in recent years, Haspel isn’t the representative of a political faction. She’s a career intelligence officer with over 30 years of experience. Haspel joined the CIA in 1985, working as a case officer for several years in both Africa and Europe. Over time, she rose up the ranks, serving as deputy director of the National Clandestine Service and chief of staff for the director of operations. In addition, Haspel served as chief of station – that is, the agent responsible for overseeing all of the CIA’s work in a foreign country – four times. If confirmed, she would be the first CIA director in decades who has spent her entire career at the agency – as well as the first woman to lead the agency. Having served under six different presidents from both parties, Haspel is far from an ideologue. She’s an institutionalist who has put in so many years of work that she commands respect throughout the rank and file at the CIA. Haspel’s opponents have tried to use a small sliver of her career against her by arguing, essentially, that she was just too tough on Al Qaeda for this country to bear. But I’d argue that her willingness to serve in what was a highly stressful post only enhances the case for her confirmation. In the early 2000s, as the fight against Islamist terrorism heated up, Haspel asked to be reassigned to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, where her first day on the job was Sept. 11, 2001. It’s easy to forget that we lost 3,000 Americans that day in the worst attacks on American soil since Pearl Harbor – and that this was an especially trying time for all those working on national security. As former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently said: “If you were not in a position of authority on 9/11, you have no idea the pressures we faced to make sure that this country wasn’t attacked again.” And yet Haspel volunteered for the mission, later earning the George H.W. Bush Award, granted for excellence in counterterrorism; the Intelligence Medal of Merit; and the Presidential Rank Award, the most prestigious distinction in all of federal civil service. It’s true, as her critics charge, that Haspel was involved in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, but once again, their potshots miss the mark. The president approved this program, Congress was fully briefed on it, and it included multiple layers of legal review.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) is spot on here.  Gina is eminently qualified for the job and hope the Senate will confirm her soon.  For those of you who may not know, Sen. Cotton is a former solider/warrior who enlisted and then later became an officer, rising to the rank of Captain.  He was an “airborne Ranger” who served in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was awarded the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, the Bronze Star, among other medals.  So, the man isn’t some political hack.  He’s a warrior who recognizes a patriot like Gina, when he sees her.  To read the rest of Sen. Cotton’s op/ed, click on the text above.     🙂

Sen. Cotton: Durbin ‘Has a History’ of Misrepresenting What Happens in WH Meetings

Sunday on CBS’s “Face The Nation,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) misrepresented President Donald Trump reported comments referring to Haiti, and El Salvador and African nations. Cotton said, “I didn’t hear that word either. I certainly didn’t hear what Sen. Durbin has said repeatedly. Sen. Durbin has a history of misrepresenting what happens in White House meetings, though, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by that.” After being pressed, Cotton said, “I didn’t hear it. And I was sitting no farther away from Donald Trump than Dick Durbin was, and I know what Dick Durbin has said about the president’s repeated statements is incorrect.” Dickerson asked, “So, is Senator Durbin lying?” Cotton said, “Sen. Durbin has misrepresented what happened in White House meetings before. And he was corrected by an Obama administration official.” He added, “The president reacted with pretty tough language as he said because we want to move to a system that treats people for who they are not where they are from.”

Fair enough!