DSCC blames GOP Senate candidates for causing shutdown

{mosads}”Tom Cotton’s government shutdown cost the economy at least $24 billion dollars and shaved 0.6% off the nation’s economic growth. Voters will not reward the recklessness and irresponsibility Cotton demonstrated when he started a fire and after allowing it to burn for weeks finally decided to throw some water on it,” reads one version of the memo.

“Tom Cotton hurt Arkansas’s economy and wasted taxpayer dollars when he pushed his reckless and irresponsible government shutdown and voted repeatedly to continue it, failing to do the right thing for Arkansas and putting reckless partisanship ahead of what’s best for his constituents and the country,” DSCC spokesman Justin Barasky says in one of the hits.

“Weeks ago, Cotton could have voted for a nearly identical deal to what he voted for last night that would have prevented the reckless government shutdown, sparing hard-working Arkansans a lot of pain, but Tom Cotton decided to spend over two weeks playing politics and pushing a dangerous partisan political agenda. The damage has been done and in 2014, Arkansans will remember that Tom Cotton had no interest in fighting for them in Washington.”

Cotton’s vote to end the shutdown was something of a surprise — he had argued for using the leverage of government funding as a “tool” over the summer and is a favorite of the Club for Growth, which opposed the compromise. Moore Capito and Daines, who is likely to run for the Senate, were both likely votes to end the shutdown, though both joined their House GOP colleagues in the initial refusal to vote to keep the government open without changes to ObamaCare.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee fired back.

“The government shutdown reinforced one reoccurring theme, it’s that Harry Reid’s Senate always seems to be in the center of Washington’s dysfunction,” said NRSC spokeswoman Brook Hougesen. “It is where reform goes to die, which is why voters from North Carolina to Alaska, Michigan to Louisiana are going to elect leaders who listen, not who think Washington knows better. Time and again, Harry Reid creates problems and Mitch McConnell fixes them.”

Other House Republicans running for the Senate voted against the compromise: Reps. Bill Cassidy (La.), Jack Kingston (Ga.), Paul Broun (Ga.) and Phil Gingrey (Ga.) all refused to back the bill.

This post was updated at 12:25 p.m.