Arpaio pardon breaks tradition
Ariz. sheriff’s reprieve unusual in every way
Almost everything about President Trump’s pardon of former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio was unusual.
Trump chose a politically polarizing anti-immigration sheriff as the recipient of his first pardon — the kind of controversial grant of clemency recent presidents have reserved for the 11th hour rather than their first act.
Arpaio didn’t meet the Justice Department guidelines for a pardon. His conviction wasn’t 5 years old, he hadn’t expressed remorse and he hadn’t even applied to the Office of Pardon Attorney.
White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said the president would follow a “thorough and standard process” in considering the pardon. That process usually requires seven layers of review and an FBI background check.
No matter. The constitutional authority to “grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States” is arguably the most absolute power a president has.
He has to work with Congress to pass bills, appoint Cabinet secretaries or negotiate treaties. But a pardon can be granted with the stroke of a pen — sometimes not even that — and can’t be overturned by Congress or the courts. Not even the president himself can take it back.
Despite the absolute nature of the power — or perhaps because of it — presidents are often downright shy about it.
► President Truman didn’t publicly disclose his pardons.
► President Ford pardoned his predecessor, Richard Nixon, on a Sunday morning, giving no advance warning.
► President George H.W. Bush pardoned key figures in the Irancontra affair only after losing re-election.
► President Clinton pardoned fugitive financier Mark Rich, two Democratic congressmen, a figure in the Whitewater scandal and his own brother — all on his last day in office.
None of them telegraphed their intentions quite like Trump, who had openly hinted at the Arpaio pardon for two weeks.
“I think he’s going to be just fine,” Trump said at a rally in Phoenix on Tuesday. But he said he wouldn’t announce the pardon then because it would be too “controversial.”
“This is just the most in-yourface gesture imaginable for the pardon power,” said Mark Rozell, dean of the public policy school at George Mason University and a pardon scholar. “We’re going to pardon someone who hasn’t admitted that what he’s done is a crime and has shown no remorse.”
President Reagan refused to pardon the Iran-contra figures, including Lt. Col. Oliver North, because it would signal that North had done something illegal that needed pardoning.
Though a pardon can undo a conviction in the eyes of the law, it can condemn them in the eyes of history.
“From the very beginning, I’ve said that to consider a pardon would leave — even if I did that — would leave them under a shadow of guilt for the rest of their lives,” Reagan said the month before he left office.
In pardoning Arpaio — who was convicted last month for defying a judge’s order to release from jail people suspected of immigration offenses — Trump bypassed 2,270 other pending applications for pardons, most of which have waited for years.
Beyond Arpaio, Trump has shown little interest in the pardon power. The Office of Pardon Attorney has no director, and Trump has not provided the office with any guidance about how to process its pending cases.
Friday night, Trump tweeted one of his reasons for the Arpaio pardon, saying the 85-year-old former sheriff “kept Arizona safe.”
Arpaio’s opponents accused him of engaging in racial profiling and physical abuse of Hispanic inmates.
P.S. Ruckman Jr., a political scientist who has studied the history of presidential pardons, said Trump’s use of a pardon for Arpaio looks more like crass politics than a serious use of an important presidential power.
“This looks more like a stunt,” he said. “He’ll get the mileage out of it, and the publicity, and rile up the base.”
After dangling the possibility of a pardon so publicly, he said, “it would be bizarre if he didn’t pardon the guy.”