Cotton targets HHS nominee Becerra in new ads as confirmation heads to Senate floor

Republican Sen. Tom Cotton represents Arkansas, but his latest political ads are currently running digitally in Georgia and New Hampshire.

The spots target Xavier Becerra, the California attorney general who President Biden has nominated to become the nation’s first Latino secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. The confirmation is headed to the Senate floor after the Finance Committee deadlocked last week in a party line vote.

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Republicans trying to sink Becerra's confirmation slam his lack of medical experience and his support for abortion access. Conservative groups are dishing out hundreds of thousands of dollars into ads to pressure moderate Democrats not to support him. Among them are Cotton's spots.

"Becerra supports Bernie's government takeover of your health care, eliminating your employer provided coverage," the narrator in the spot charges. "You can't trust Xavier Becerra with your health care. Tell your senator to vote no."

And a statement on Cotton's campaign website argues that "Xavier Becerra is a radical liberal with no real public health experience besides enforcing California's disastrous lockdowns. If confirmed, Xavier Becerra will put the health insurance we get at our jobs at risk. Any Senator who votes for Xavier Becerra will face a reckoning from voters in the next election."

The ads have been running the past two weeks in Georgia — where Democrat Raphael Warnock faces a challenging reelection for a full six-year term, after narrowly winning January's special runoff election to fill the final two years of the term of former GOP Sen. Johnny Isakson. They're also running in New Hampshire, where former governor and first-term Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan could possibly face a difficult reelection in the 2022 midterms.

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This isn't the first time that Cotton – who likely harbors national ambitions and is considered by political pundits to be a potential 2024 GOP presidential contender – has run ads outside of Arkansas. Facing nominal opposition last year in his home state as he ran for reelection, Cotton went up with ads in the general election battleground states of Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa that targeted then-Democratic presidential nominee Biden.

Cotton also crisscrossed the country, campaigning in key swing states on behalf of then-President Trump's 2020 reelection as well as for down-ballot Republicans. He told Fox News while on the campaign trail last summer that "the stakes of this election, I don't think could be any higher. What concerns me about the risk of losing the White House and losing the Senate is the radical agenda the Democrats have proposed."

But a stop last year in Iowa and two in New Hampshire, the first two states to hold contests in the presidential nominating calendar, only sparked more speculation about Cotton's 2024 aspirations. The new digital ad running in New Hampshire fuels more speculation.

But an adviser close to the senator and veteran Army infantry officer who served in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars pointed out to Fox News that "if you notice, he (Cotton) is not featured in the ads except for the disclaimer at the end."

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"The purpose of these ads is to go after these nominees and put (pressure on) those particular senators who we think are vulnerable," emphasized the adviser, who asked to remain anonymous to speak more freely.

The Senate is currently split 50/50 but the Democrats control a razor thin majority due to the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris, through her role as president of the Senate. That means the GOP only needs a net gain of one seat to win back control of the chamber.

"Tom wants a Senate that has a majority for the Republicans," the adviser said. "He'll be out there fighting for a Republican majority in the United States Senate."