Tag: Arpaio

Krugman calls it fascism.

Mind you he seems to think it requires some justification, while I think it’s obvious, but then he’s writing in the Times and I’m not.

Let’s call things by their proper names here. Arpaio is, of course, a white supremacist. But he’s more than that. There’s a word for political regimes that round up members of minority groups and send them to concentration camps, while rejecting the rule of law: What Arpaio brought to Maricopa, and what the president of the United States has just endorsed, was fascism, American style.

And fascism goes in stages; it’s not the full-blown thing from day one. Trump is getting steadily more horrific. That’s how this goes.

Maybe we’ll manage to stop him before he rounds us all up and puts us in camps, but we can hardly be complacent about it.

What makes it possible for someone like Trump to attain power and hold it is the acquiescence of people, both voters and politicians, who aren’t white supremacists, who sort-of kind-of believe in the rule of law, but are willing to go along with racists and lawbreakers if it seems to serve their interests.

There have been endless reports about the low-education white voters who went overwhelmingly for Trump last November. But he wouldn’t have made it over the top without millions of votes from well-educated Republicans who — despite the media’s orgy of false equivalence or worse (emails!) — had no excuse for not realizing what kind of man he was. For whatever reason, be it political tribalism or the desire for lower taxes, they voted for him anyway.

And more of the rich well-educated class voted for Trump than voted for Clinton, so it’s not the case that it was mostly angry white proletarians.

We may well be in the early stages of a constitutional crisis. Does anyone consider it unthinkable that Trump will fire Robert Mueller, and try to shut down investigations into his personal and political links to Russia? Does anyone have confidence that Republicans in Congress will do anything more than express mild disagreement with his actions if he does?

As I said, there’s a word for people who round up members of ethnic minorities and send them to concentration camps, or praise such actions. There’s also a word for people who, out of cowardice or self-interest, go along with such abuses: collaborators. How many such collaborators will there be? I’m afraid we’ll soon find out.

The struggle continues.

A scholar of political institutions says how Trump’s pardon deviates from other presidential pardons.

It is hard to gauge the political fallout of the president’s decision — announced as it was late on a Friday night during an impending hurricane. Normally, though, as political scientist Jeffrey Crouch’s book on the pardon power makes clear, pardons are granted for two reasons: either to provide mercy or correct a miscarriage of justice, in an individual case; or on more general grounds based on public policy.

Trump’s doesn’t fit the mercy category very well, because of its haste and because of the lack of contrition.

(Further, in considering such petitions, “The extent to which a petitioner has accepted responsibility for his or her criminal conduct and made restitution to its victims are important considerations.”)

Yeah that’s not Arpaio. He’d do it again if he could.

Pardons also serve as a check against the judicial branch, when the president feels a grave miscarriage of justice has occurred. At his Phoenix rally, Trump seemed to make this claim, saying that “Sheriff Joe was convicted for doing his job.”

The problem with that, though, is that Arpaio was convicted for doing the opposite of his job. As a sworn officer of law enforcement, he violated the law and then ignored court orders designed to bring his policies in line with statutory and constitutional mandates.

This is an important point. His job is to enforce the law, and he himself flipped the bird at the law.

Two different federal judges found, respectively, that the “constitutional violations” committed by Arpaio’s office were “broad in scope, involve its highest ranking command staff, and flow into its management of internal affairs investigations” and that he “willfully violated” directives to correct those violations.

That in turn circles back to the public policy rationale for pardons. Presidents have given clemency to both individuals and groups, arguing that doing so serves the broader public good — such cases range from Thomas Jefferson’s 1801 pardons of those convicted under the Alien and Sedition Acts to Gerald Ford’s 1974 pardon of former president Richard M. Nixon to Barack Obama’s commutation of more than 1,700 prison terms he thought were skewed by the past mandatory imposition of long sentences even for nonviolent crimes.

Here, though, it is hard to see how the public interest has been served. Rather than “restore the tranquility of the commonwealth” (as Hamilton thought a pardon might do), Trump’s action seems likely to harden its divisions. Arpaio’s status as what George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum calls “America’s second most famous Obama birther” and his long history of abusing his office hardly makes him a symbol of the unity the president has intermittently claimed to desire after Charlottesville. And pardoning a sheriff for disobeying federal law is substantively out of step with the constitutional mandate that the president faithfully execute that law — and with the foundational American concept of “a government of laws and not of men.”

In other words it’s disastrous in pretty much any way you can look at it.

Adam Liptak in the Times reminds us that there’s nothing we can do about it. Ford’s outrageous pardon of Nixon taught us ancients that long ago.

But in the process the Times included an elaboration that is bleakly funny.

The courts, Congress and the public have few avenues to take action against a president who issues a contentious pardon. Legislation, for instance, is not an option.

“This power of the president is not subject to legislative control,” the Supreme Court said in 1866. “Congress can neither limit the effect of his pardon nor exclude from its exercise any class of offenders. The benign prerogative of mercy reposed in him cannot be fettered by any legislative restrictions.”

“The benign prerogative of mercy” – as if mercy had anything to do with this. (I’m sure that’s why Liptak included that sentence: for the painful irony.) It’s hard to think of anyone who shows less trace of mercy or benignity than Donald Trump: he’s all malevolence, anger, dominance. He didn’t pardon Arpaio out of mercy for Arpaio but out of hatred and contempt for us, and out of loyalty to the principle of bullying sadism that Arpaio has embodied for decades.