Cotton versus the Trumps
Fred Barnes
November 27, 2018 at 2:46 AM
What happens when the president's son and one of his closest allies spar over criminal justice reform?
Republican senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas is in a precarious position. He has taken on the Trump Monster, both sides of it, left and right. That means he’s at odds with Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and the leader of the family’s left wing. The president himself constitutes the right wing.
At issue between the Trumps and Cotton is prison and criminal sentencing reform. Kushner is the champion of a reform bill that also has the backing of GOP Senate heavyweights like Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Many Democratic senators favor it too. And the liberal establishment is likely to go along.
The president had been a skeptic, or at least sounded like one, until endorsing the bill two weeks ago. That was not exactly a surprise. Even for presidents, blood runs thicker than ties to political friends. Cotton is one of Trump’s closest allies in Washington.
Cotton has been criticizing the reform proposal almost from the moment he was elected in 2014. He calls it a “jailbreak†proposal. He rejects the idea, promoted by liberals, civil rights groups, many libertarians on the right, and the media, that the country has a “mass incarceration†problem—that is, too many prisoners and too many overcrowded prisons. Not so, Cotton says. “If anything, we have an under-incarceration problem,†he said in a speech in 2016.
more
https://www.weeklystandard.com/fred-barnes/cotton-versus-the-trumps
