"I'm forced to listen to the bitter, vulgar, incoherent ramblings of the minority leader," Cotton said. "Normally, like every other American, I ignore them. I can't ignore them today. . . . When was the last time the minority leader read a bill? It was probably an electricity bill."

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Cotton wasn't done there. He also had this to say about the fact the Senate is working the least amount in 60 years, which is the last year Reid is in office before he retires:

"Whatever you think about that, the happy by-product of fewer days in session in the Senate is that this institution will be cursed less with his cancerous leadership," Cotton said.

Yikes.

Everett reports that Reid came back on the Senate floor for other business and curtly replied: "I think it would distract from what we're doing here today to go into the statements by the very junior senator from Arkansas." (Emphasis on the "junior," a running theme in Reid's retorts to Cotton, who at 39 is the youngest member of the Senate.)

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And on Wednesday after we published this story, Cotton tweeted this:

Like I said, though, this isn't the first time the two have been at each other's throats. Here's a brief — and sure to be growing — history of Cotton tangling with Reid.

March 2015

Cotton was never on Reid's good side, by nature of the party he's in and the guy he threw out to get to Washington: Reid's Democratic colleague, Mark Pryor. But Cotton escalated things with Reid pretty quickly after arriving in the Senate, when he wrote a letter to the leaders of Iran telling them any nuclear deal with Iran could be revoked. Forty-six other senators signed it.

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Reid called the letter a "hard slap in the face" — right to Cotton's face, in fact. Cotton was the presiding officer of the Senate, a job often assigned to freshmen senators, while Reid ripped into him. And in a not-so-veiled slight at Cotton's age, Reid called the letter "juvenile” and added it was done “purely out of spite.”

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But as many Senate Republicans have come to know, a public spat by Reid can sometimes be a good thing for their careers. Cotton earned some star power in conservative circles for the bold move that so infuriated Democrats like Reid, and a state lawmaker back home introduced a bill to allow him to run for reelection to his Senate seat and for president at the same time in 2020.

August 2015

The two men's next public spat came in August, at the height of the Iran deal debate in the Senate.

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Reid helped fend off an effort to kill the deal in the Republican-controlled Senate. He did that in part by stalling a vote. (In the Senate, one lawmaker can hold up an entire vote.)

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Cotton had become Republicans' leading opponent of the deal, and he was super unhappy about Reid's attempts to stall his attempts to kill the deal (#Congress). He called Reid "scared" of actually taking a vote and accused Reid of being self-centered. "It seems that Harry Reid believes that only his and the president’s voices matter," Cotton said.

Pretty much all of 2016 so far

Another calendar year, another blow-up between Reid and Cotton on the Iran deal, which at that point had been signed and sealed by Obama and not killed by the Senate.

But Cotton wasn't done trying to weaken it. In April, he tried to add an amendment critical of the deal to a broader energy and water spending bill.

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It forced Senate Democrats to spend two days blocking the entire spending bill. In Senate language, that was a thumb in the eye of Reid and the Democrats he leads.

"They know that the policy is indefensible and they would rather just block the entire bill," Cotton said as Senate Democrats were forced to do just that.

And then Wednesday happened, taking the Reid-Cotton thing to a whole new level.

Bonus: Reince Priebus really, really, really doesn't like Harry Reid, either

Cotton isn't the only Republican who is extra vocal about his distaste for Reid. In 2014, the head of the entire party, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, called Reid "so dirty and so unethical."