In the last week, George Santos, an incoming Republican representative for New York City, has belatedly come under scrutiny, which is to say people have caught him lying about everything from his heritage to where he lives. Now there’s a report about Tom Cotton, the mildly notorious GOP senator from Arizona, that raises questions about how much time he spends in the state he represents.
The report, from Arkansas Times, explores how much time Cotton and his family, namely his wife and two kids, spend in Little Rock, Arkansas, where they moved to several years ago. It doesn’t appear to be much. Most Senators tend to make numerous trips to D.C. but spend most of their time in their home state. Indeed, many try to spend as little time in the nation’s capitol as possible. Cotton appears not to do that. Instead, his office paid for zero trips in 2021 and none between January and September.
What’s more, those who live in the apartment complex where he’s registered to vote don’t recall him walking down the halls or borrowing brown sugar. “You’ll never see him,” says his next-door neighbor, who says he’s only spotted him a few times in the last three years. He says he sometimes hears noises late at night but never during the day.
Another neighbor, who lives across the hall, says they’ve never seen anyone entering or leaving the unit. There was that time last year when she heard children during the weekend. They used to think it was being used as an Airbnb.
But what of Cotton’s social media accounts? Every now and then he posts pictures of him in the Wonder State, but only infrequently. Sure enough, he can go several weeks without posting posts confirming that he’s at home.
It’s not even clear if his family lives there or in the D.C. area. Cotton’s wife has voted absentee 11 times since 2016. The last time she voted in person was back in 2014. She’s listed as a lawyer in four different states, none of them Arkansas.
Cotton came to prominence during the summer of 2020, when he penned an op-ed for The New York Times in which he recommended sending the National Guard to New York City to squash Black Lives Matter protesters. He wasn’t a strict MAGA hardliner; he was among those who came out against Trump’s voter fraud claims, which did before the Jan. 6 riot, which he later condemned. Then again, he was also one of a mere handful of senators who voted against a bill meant to help stop attacks on Asian-American citizens during an uptick in hate crimes.