Sen. Tom Cotton will likely consider a rip of him by Charles Pierce of Esquire a badge of honor, but Pierce has his number, particularly on Cotton’s view of the need for a new war on drugs and to lock more people up.
Pierce’s turns of phrase would be funny if not for the seriousness of the Cotton agenda. (He’s a “jumped-up wingnut-welfare hothouse orchid,” writes Pierce, who “makes Frank Underwood look like a cloistered Trappist.” He notes Lindsey Graham called Cotton the “Steve King of the Senate,” no compliment.
Pierce says Cotton may make enough noise to stop a bipartisan justice reform bill in the Senate. He writes, too, that it’s about Cotton’s ambition to run for president.
Everybody with even a passing expertise with the American criminal justice system—from cops to prosecutors to defense lawyers to inmates—realizes that this system is dangerously out of whack. It is racially biased. It is shot through with double standards based on class. The prisons are overcrowded, and privatizing them has proven to be a wretched failure. Every state has at least one maximum-security facility that is ready to blow. And you can’t reform this system without reforming the process of sentencing the people in it.
And this is where Tom Cotton has decided to plant his flag for 2024 or whenever. He spends a lot of time tweeting out the details of atrocity crimes across America—a cheap trick for conservative con-men since before he was born. In every sense, he is an extremist, and not just on this issue, either.