The pardoning of a “fascist” sheriff
Presidential pardons often generate controversy, said Amelia ThomsonDeveaux on Fivethirtyeight.com, but none has been quite as divisive as Donald Trump’s recent pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Arpaio is the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, who developed a reputation as America’s toughest law enforcer during his 24 years in office by humiliating prison inmates and hounding illegal immigrants. He once dispatched a “Cold Case Posse” to Hawaii to hunt for evidence that President Obama’s birth certificate was forged. In July, Arpaio was convicted of contempt of court, after he defied a judge’s order to stop pulling over Hispanic motorists without cause. But thanks to Trump – whose campaign Arpaio heartily endorsed – he will now escape punishment. This pardon “crosses a line”, said Garrett Epps in The Atlantic. Arpaio didn’t commit just any crime; he deliberately disobeyed a federal court. By endorsing his “racist discrimination”, Trump is showing utter contempt for the law.
“Sheriffs shouldn’t defy court orders,” said Paul Mirengoff on Powerlineblog.com, but Arpaio had no malign intent: he was simply “being overzealous in combating illegal immigration”. He could see that the federal authorities were failing to do the job properly, so he stepped into the breach. Naturally, that made him a political target. The Obama Justice Department filed charges against Arpaio, reportedly just two weeks before he was up for re-election, and the judge in his case – a Clinton appointee – refused his request for a jury trial. By pardoning him, Trump has simply brought “a political end to a political case”, thereby signalling that he is committed to the tough immigration policy that got him elected.
Arpaio wasn’t just a “tough” sheriff, said Paul Krugman in The New York Times. He was a monster who engaged in “fascism, American-style”. The inmates in his care – many of whom were on pre-trial detention and hadn’t been convicted of any crime – were fed starvation rations of spoiled food and made to wear oldfashioned stripy uniforms and pink underwear. Arpaio brought back chain gangs, for women and juveniles too, and housed detainees in a “Tent City” in the desert – he joked that the facility was his own personal “concentration camp” – where temperatures could reach 63°C. An estimated 157 prisoners died in his care, and taxpayers shelled out $140m to litigate and settle lawsuits prompted by his barbaric abuses. What makes it worse, said Nathan J. Robinson in Current Affairs, is that these harsh tactics came at the expense of actual policing: hundreds of serious crimes, including many child molestation cases, went uninvestigated by Arpaio’s office. This man is no “righteous vigilante”; he’s a “bigot” and a “vicious sadist who abused his power more than perhaps anyone else to hold public office in the United States during the 21st century”.