Political writers continue to weigh in on the ramifications of Donald Trump’s pardon of sadistic Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio. Pursuing a theme he’s revisited over the past months, Brian Beutler highlights the Republican Party’s position vis-a-vis the pardon. Pointing to the discouraging silence on the part of nearly all elected Republican officials, he reminds us that the pardon power is a presidential prerogative impossible to counter by ordinary legislative means; it really can’t be constrained by passing a law. Their only available remedy is impeachment, an option on which the GOP is deafeningly silent. But Beutler points out that the Republicans who control Congress do have secondary remedies, such as investigating the pardon and passing laws that signal to law enforcement that racism won’t be tolerated — approaches that the GOP currently seems content to leave unexamined.
Beutler also identifies some of the destructive messages contained in this pardon: it encourages abuse by other law enforcement members, encourages white supremacists, and constitutes a test of Trump’s pardon power as a future way to defeat Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Paul Krugman goes a step further in Monday’s column, identifying Arpaio as an exemplar of an American fascism, and the pardon as Trump’s endorsement of it; referencing Arpaio’s own description of his tent prison as a “concentration camp,” Krugman writes:
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.
Krugman’s characterization is helpful in part because it also helps explain how we got to this perilous moment; the authoritarian behavior and systematic racism that Trump threatens have been exercised by other Republican politicians for decades now, and broadly excused by the GOP. Sheriff Arpaio, after all, had been re-elected over the course of twenty years, and indeed was only defeated at the ballot box in November 2016. And we see various flavors of this behavior across the country, from police killings of unarmed African Americans to the way law enforcement has been turned into a revenue-raising function of the state in towns like Ferguson, where African-Americans have been targeted for “crimes” that, say, a white middle-class person would never be subjected to.
In light of which — Jamelle Bouie connects the dots between the Arpaio pardon and the president’s decision to resume the full-on 1033 program of supplying military surplus to police departments around the country. He writes, “This too represents an attack on accountability, and together with the Arpaio pardon, they show a key priority for this administration: impunity for those with state authority and attendant disregard for the people that authority is wielded on, often cruelly.” Bouie also sees in both actions a fetishization of law and order by the president “at the expense of actual rule of law.” (This opposition of law and order versus rule of law seems to be a bit of a meme lately, and it seems a promisingly concise way to communicate what’s wrong with Trump’s approach on many fronts).
Finally, in a piece on the president’s demented Arizona rally at which he teased the possibility of an Arpaio pardon, Joan Walsh links Trump’s pardon talk to Steve Bannon’s departure from the White House, describing the impending pardon, and Trump’s speech more generally, as an attempt to demonstrate to his followers that Bannon’s departure has left him no less virulent a supporter of white nationalism.
Although it's ultimately up to the Republicans whether or not to attempt to constrain the president's abuse of the pardon power, nothing is stopping the Democrats and other opponents of Trump to create an atmosphere that makes such efforts more likely. It's vital to get the word out on what a vile and undeserving recipient of the pardon Joe Arpaio is, how this pardon connects to broader systemic racism that abuses immigrants and literally kills Americans, and sets a dangerous precedent for further abuse by a president beset by myriad crises of his own making.
