Former Trump official enrages Arkansas Republicans over money pit proposal

A former Trump official has returned home to infuriate her Republican friends, reports the New York Times.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders was President Donald Trump’s White House press secretary in his first term. She has since gone home to become the first woman governor of Arkansas. This year, however, the GOP leader is cutting a swath of bitterness through her fellow Republicans in the legislature. A handful of Republican state senators are blocking Sanders’ push to build the state’s largest prison. They complain about the project’s $825 million cost and the infrastructure strain of creating 3,000 new beds in a rural area with unpaved roads and no water infrastructure to supply it.

“Her response? Oust two of them, Bryan King and Ronald Caldwell, in Tuesday’s Republican primaries,” reports the Times.

“Mr. King, a poultry farmer, is the legislature’s most outspoken contrarian. He has been unafraid to blast the governor and anyone, really, on cryptocurrency, cronyism and more, and he has demanded an investigation into the prison, contending that the cost could exceed $1 billion,” said the Times.

“I’ve remained the same since 2006 when I went in, which is about fiscal responsibility and conservatism,” King told the Times, “which unfortunately is dead with this governor.”

Arkansas top-ranking Senator, Bart Hester, told the Times that King merely has “a real hard time with a young, successful female leading the state.”

King blasted that claim.

“Bart Hester is a liar, and he’s a hypocrite,” King told the Times.

Caldwell, meanwhile, claims he has voted with Sanders “probably 98, 99 percent of the time.” He even credits her with assisting the area’s recovery efforts after a devastating tornado in 2023. But he opposes Sanders on the prison’s exorbitant cost, as well as her education and private-school tuition voucher program and her efforts to restrict the state’s Freedom of Information Act.

“The system has set up that there are three separate branches of government, and I think that’s where we should be,” said Caldwell. “It’s not a personal thing at all.”

Caldwell’s preferred opponent, Trey Bohannan, has called Caldwell “Donald Trump’s worst enemy in the State Senate” for opposing vouchers and embracing renewable energy and frames the election as a loyalty test, according to the Times.

But Bohannan has been on the defensive over his short-term residency in the district and his business association with a man convicted of stalking a teenager.

The Times reports Sanders has “solidified a conservative majority on the state Supreme Court, commandeered the Board of Corrections and called for generational and ideological change in the legislature.” And now she’s looking to dispose of any Republican hindrance to her 1990’s-era, tough-on-crime criminal justice agenda. Her expensive pro-incarceration stance comes at a time when Arkansas is behind only neighboring Mississippi and Louisiana in incarcerations per capita. Sanders has already reduced parole eligibility and mandated longer prison sentences, the Times reports.

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