Looking at this broadly, a move to appoint Cotton is yet another shift in the direction of the extreme right’s intention to redesign or restructure (whatever you want to call it) the federal government and its institutions. Tillerson has already taken a wrecking ball to the department of state; now it’s time to neuter the intelligence agencies of their bureaucratic objectivity and to make them function as partisan enforcers of the right wing. Cotton, it would seem, is up to that task. But even if he’s not, someone else will be. Get used to it, boys. The age of authoritarianism is upon us.