WATCH: Tom Cotton And Ben Shapiro Talk Trump Sending The National Guard To Los Angeles

Senator Tom Cotton praised President Donald Trump’s decisive action against the Los Angeles rioters to Daily Wire editor emeritus Ben Shapiro.

The Arkansas Republican, who caused a stir with his 2020 New York Times op-ed urging the president to “Send In The Troops” to quell the George Floyd riots, remains supportive of Trump invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 to federalize the National Guard.

“First you want to see the local police control any violence. If they’re not able to, or, in some cases like you’ve seen in California, they’re not allowed to, that’s why you have a National Guard,” Cotton said on Monday’s episode of The Ben Shapiro Show. “The final authority is the Insurrection Act. It’s a law that goes back to the founding of the republic, nearly.”

Cotton noted that President George H.W. Bush used the Insurrection Act to federalize the National Guard during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, as did President Dwight Eisenhower in 1957, to enforce the integration of Little Rock Central High School. Trump has not just precedent, but a duty, Cotton says, to protect both “innocent lives and property” in Los Angeles, as well as “protecting local police, protecting ICE, the FBI, ATF and federal property.”

The senator said that local law enforcement personnel were either unable or unwilling to put a stop to the rioters, who are throwing bricks at federal vehicles, setting cars on fire, and attacking federal law enforcement personnel. The riots began over the weekend in response to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arresting illegal immigrants in Los Angeles.

“It is amazing to me that one of the main parties in the United States is suggesting that the basic enforcement of immigration law is now a provocation to lawlessness and that the lawlessness is actually a secondary problem,” Shapiro said.

Cotton agreed, saying that “You can’t say that just because we’re enforcing the law, which the American people elected President Trump and Republicans to do last year, that we’re going to riot in the streets.”

“The Democrats, again, are an open borders party and now they’ve taken an open borders philosophy to the enforcement of basic laws inside of our country,” he added.

“They’re opposed to law and order,” Cotton said. “They’re on the side of violent, illegal aliens who are setting businesses and cars on fire while they wave flags of foreign countries.”