No matter how much lipstick you see on a collar, or strange perfume you catch on a shirt, there is part of us that always holds out hope that the evidence we see hinting towards something awful is wrong; A hope that despite the signs, the underlying message is different.
But when you walk in on the cheating couple, that hope is removed and even though you might have strongly suspected infidelity the whole time, something about getting absolute knowledge still hits like a hammer.
Yesterday, we got that absolute confirmation: Our president is an unapologetic and soul-deep racist who believes his inner circle is above the law.
Joe Arpaio - The Tyrant of Arizona
Sheriff Arpaio has a long and sordid history in Arizona, the kind of history you would think would horrify any reasonable person including unconstitutional jail living conditions, failure to investigate sexual assault cases, misuse of funds, abuse of power, election law violations, and even a staged assassination plot to boost his election ratings.But he’s most known for his racial profiling.
Starting in 2005, Arpaio started hunting down people ‘he suspected’ of being illegal immigrants in a crusade to stop border violations including roving bands that would hunt down and pick up random Latinos for processing. All evidence points to the fact that he ‘suspected’ people were illegal if they were Latino and, well, in Arizona. In 2007, he pulled over a Mexican tourist named Manuel De Jesus Ortega Melendres and held him for 9 hours in horrid conditions. Melendres sued him and that suit gained traction with others who had been unlawfully detained by ‘America’s Toughest Sheriff’.
On December 23rd, 2011, Arpaio was ordered by the court from “detaining any person based only on knowledge or reasonable belief, without more, that the person is unlawfully present within the United States”
This is consistent with pretty much all criminal law. You can’t arrest someone without probable cause, and thinking you know a thing doesn’t rise to that level….but let’s get back to the events.
After Melendres, Arpaio essentially ignored the ruling and refused to cooperate with the court order. He was found in contempt of three courts and ultimately convicted of criminal contempt in federal court as he continued to single out Latinos for enforcement, investigation and deportation.
In May of 2012, the US Department of Justice filed suit against him and in that complaint, says Arpaio ‘criminalized’ being Latino and tortured prisoners with limited English skills. This included assault on pregnant women, ignoring rape, forcing women to sleep in their own menstrual blood, and more.
Understand that despite these horrors, Joe Arpaio is facing a maximum sentence of six months in jail for criminal contempt in his disregard for the court order demanding he stop racial profiling. His status as elected sheriff protected him from criminal charges for his actions in what the DOJ said was unconstitutionally cruel treatment of prisoners.
All of this is available on Wikipedia and numerous public domain documents including the criminal and civil complaints.
But this is Donald Trump’s take:
“Is there anyone in local law enforcement who has done more to crack down on illegal immigration than Sheriff Joe?” Trump said, according to Fox News. “He has protected people from crimes and saved lives. He doesn’t deserve to be treated this way.”
Pure Race
A pardon is powerful. A pardon removes a conviction entirely. It doesn’t just remove the penalty for the crime, it removes any evidence or mark of that crime on the person pardoned. A pardon communicates to the rest of the nation that the conviction was wrong or the person has paid a unique debt to our society in what they’ve done and deserve to be lifted from the illegalities they committed. What a pardon can’t do is remove the fact that the person went through the legal process of being charged and convicted before being pardoned. It leaves us to judge whether the pardon is just.
The typical defense of this particular pardon, like so many in the conservative sphere, will focus on what Joe Arpaio intended and stated he wanted to achieve. They will talk of being hard on illegal immigration and fighting against those who break the law. They won’t know about the tent camps he set up that in HIS words he called ‘concentration camps’. They won’t know about the roving bands of men who hunted Latinos by the color of their skin to check them for papers. They won’t know about the election tampering, misuse of funds, or staged plots against him to maintain power. They won’t remember the pink underwear he forced all inmates to wear as part of humiliation efforts or the fact that the department of justice described his methods as ‘making it illegal to be Latino’.
But more than this, ignorance, they confuse the merits of his actions with the reason he was being convicted.
Stop them.
Despite being tempting to engage them with the atrocities this man inflicted on others, it’s not these crimes that he’s being pardoned for. He was convicted because he refused to obey a US court as a member of the executive branch. This is a violation of our constitutional law. Numerous attempts were made to bring him back into compliance including wanting monitors present to advise him and he utterly refused.
This is, based on evidence, one of the singularly most blatant refusals to obey the federal courts in our life time. There is no question or ambiguity about the facts here. He knew he was under this court order. He knew what was involved. He knew he was breaking that court order and he was caught doing it with mountains of evidence.
The critical issue at hand is not the six months of prison time removed. Considering his other choices and the pain he inflicted on so many, this would have been trivial justice for his horrific reign of terror over that region; a technicality conviction at best. The issue is the message that pardoning him, by itself, sends to the nation:
First, it communicates that the courts only have power if they support the president’s agenda.
Second, they say that if your intentions are aligned with national priorities, your methods don’t matter.
Third, and most importantly, it conveys clearly that a white man ‘shouldn’t be treated that way’ in reference to six month of prison time for refusing to stop literally hunting, locking up, torturing, and humiliating innocent Latios for the color of their skin or inability to speak English.
Joe Arpaio was already being forgiven his part in horrific treatment of innocent people. He’d escaped criminal charges because of his status as Sheriff and the immunity provided by that post even if he cost his district millions in settlements over his cruel and brutal treatment of Latino people in Arizona. But to forgive him yet more merely because he had some alignment to the agenda of the president despite all these things sends a clear message that not even the constitution and the courts had the authority to protect innocent Latino people from violations of our founding documents.
Friday, August 25th, 2017
After this date with this pardon, there is no longer any ambiguity about the racism of our president and his disregard for national unity that includes minorities. This act communicates clearly that being white and alt-right conservative means you are above not just federal law, but the constitution, itself;The courts have no power to enforce the constitution against those who agree with the president no matter how horrific their methods.
Anyone who supports the president after being confronted with Arpaio’s past actions and his unrepentant belief in what he did as he was pardoned must be viewed as a racist, themselves. This is hard paragraph for me to type, but this action leaves no room for ambiguity. A man tortures innocent Latino men and women, refuses to stop when the courts find him guilty of unconstitutional discrimination, and is arrested and convicted of racial profiling, and then is pardoned for disobeying that court order because ‘he doesn’t deserve this treatment’ of prison when so many innocent people were incarcerated and tortured by his hand.
The double standard is stark, horrifying, and utterly un-American.
This is the clearest depiction of a racist act by this president I have ever seen; Moreso than Charlottesville, or his campaign, or his weak shrug when Spencer was giving Nazi salutes after his election. This is an unequivocal statement that race and loyalty are not just more important that equality and law, but the most important values our president holds even over and above our constitution.
If you’re not angry yet…
Now is the time.
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