Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton just started an embarrassing public feud by trading insults

The Republican Party stands poised to shut down a government that they exert full control over. They control the House, Senate, and Executive Branch.

They hold all the cards, but rather than pass a bipartisan budget that provides funding for children’s health insurance and protects DACA recipients from being deported from the only country they’ve known their entire life, the GOP has decided to dig in its feet and stubbornly reject policy measures that the vast majority of Americans support.

The Republicans’ profound and exhaustively demonstrated inability to govern should convince every reasonable American that their future votes would be better spent on Democrats, who care about actual policy instead of self-righteous grandstanding. The GOP lacks real ideas and its members can’t even get along with each other.

Today, in an interview with MSNBC News, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) sniped at Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) by calling him the “Steve King” of the Senate. While he didn’t fully elaborate on the comparison, it’s far from flattering.

Wow, @LindseyGrahamSC just called @SenTomCotton "the Steve King of the Senate." On @MSNBC with @GarrettHaake

— Ken Dilanian (@KenDilanianNBC) January 19, 2018

Representative Steve King (R-IA) is in the running for the most bigoted, fascist member of a party that is rife with such cretins. King previously said that Barack Obama was “very, very urban.” He’s also defended racial profiling in the past and he really hates diversity and immigration. He’s tweeted about it numerous times:

Diversity is not our strength. Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban, “Mixing cultures will not lead to a higher quality of life but a lower one.” https://t.co/ZlMXzcc87w

— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) December 8, 2017

Assimilation has become a dirty word to the multiculturalist Left. Assimilation, not diversity, is our American strength.

— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) December 8, 2017

The Hill adds that King stated: “…culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” When he says “our” civilization it’s clear that he’s talking about “white” civilization and that “somebody else’s babies” means the children of people of color. King doesn’t even bother to hide his disgusting racism, he proudly flaunts it.

In other words, Graham’s claim that Tom Cotton is the Steve King of the Senate is really just a way of saying that he is the upper chamber’s resident racist-in-chief. Cotton, in turn, heard Graham’s remarks and shot back. 

“The difference between Steve King and Lindsey Graham is Steve King can actually win an election in Iowa,” Cotton said, according to Paul McLeod of Buzzfeed News. The jab is a reference to Graham’s failed presidential campaign, in which he didn’t even make it to the Iowa Republican caucuses. 

Tom Cotton: "The difference between Steve King and Lindsey Graham is Steve King can actually win an election in Iowa."

Reporters actually went "oooooh" after.

— Paul McLeod (@pdmcleod) January 19, 2018

This is in response to Cotton being told Lindsey Graham called him "the Steve King of the Senate."

Cotton also said when Lindsey Graham and Dick Durbin come to an immigration deal "that's not bipartisan… they're not adversaries."

— Paul McLeod (@pdmcleod) January 19, 2018

These petty men are the people deciding the fates of millions of Americans. Graham is doing the right thing by rejecting Cotton’s hardline, self-defeating and unAmerican approach to immigration, but he’s still culpable for remaining in a party that has so clearly thrown away all the values it once claimed to have. They’re turning on each other, but the American people are the ones who will suffer in the long term.