A terrible pardon
Trump has set a dangerous precedent by forgiving former Arizona sheriff Arpaio.
While Hurricane Harvey has been our focus of late, don’t think we didn’t notice President Donald Trump’s recent controversial pardon of former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, his fellow Obama “birther” whose hard-nosed policies and affinity for racial profiling made him a hero to some, a pariah to others.
We fall in the latter category because this was a publicity-hungry man who trampled on the rights of Hispanics in his manic pursuit of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally, retaliated against journalists and others who criticized his policies, held prisoners in scorching hot desert compounds he called “concentration camps” and, of course, pursued and tried to legitimize the fiction that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii.
His investigation of Obama’s origins caught Trump’s eye, and they became fast friends and political allies, which led to Trump’s pardon, announced on Friday night, Aug. 25, as the news world focused on Hurricane Harvey’s landfall in Texas.
Friday nights are typically when politicians put out news they want to bury, but Trump told reporters he picked that time because he thought television viewership would be high.
We doubt that, but what is more concerning is the way Trump later described Arpaio, who always called himself “America’s Toughest Sheriff.”
At the time of his pardon, Arpaio, 85, was awaiting sentencing on a contempt of court conviction for defying court orders to stop violating the constitutional rights of immigrants suspected of illegally living in the U.S. by stopping them without proper cause. The U.S. Attorney’s Office earlier had said a study of his department found “the most egregious racial profiling” in the country.
Yet Trump, when questioned by journalists last week, said this: “Sheriff Joe is a patriot, Sheriff Joe loves our country, Sheriff Joe protected our borders and Sheriff Joe was very, very unfairly treated by the Obama administration.”
U.S. Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, all Republicans, decried the pardon and so do we.
We don’t believe that Arpaio should get off scot free for his crimes, but Trump also has set a dangerous precedent by pardoning a public official who defied court orders to basically follow the Constitution.
Various groups are planning to fight the pardon on constitutional grounds, and we encourage them to fight vigorously.
Arpaio, 85, was awaiting sentencing on a contempt of court conviction for defying court orders to stop violating the constitutional rights of suspected undocumented immigrants by stopping them without proper cause.