Is Trump’s Pardon of Joe Arpaio an Impeachable Offense?

There is no debate as to the power of the president to grant pardons.  However, some are making the case that there are improper uses of such power and that Der Trumpenführer pardon of white nationalist Joe Arpaio is so inappropriate that it constitutes an impeachable offense. One piece appeared in the New York Times.  Another can be found at Slate where the author takes the position that Trump has perverted and abused the powers of his office - one of the very things that the Founding Fathers fear having thrown off the rule of an absolute monarch, George III.  Here are excerpts from the piece:

The founders included in the Constitution a congressional power to impeach presidents primarily to respond to misuse by the president of express or implied powers given him elsewhere in the document.

Presidents and other officials can be impeached for conduct not involving the exercise of a specific official power if it intrudes somehow into the sphere of public duty. And impeachment can be proper in the case of a heinous private criminal offense that so far undercuts the moral authority and personal credibility of the offender that he can no longer effectively perform his office.

But, to the founders, the main point of impeachment was that there must be a remedy when a president perverts the powers of his office, either for personal or political self-aggrandizement or, regardless of motive, when the president’s acts threaten the proper distribution of authority among the coordinate branches or otherwise offend either law or fundamental governing norms.

The pardon of Arpaio plainly falls within this core conception of properly impeachable offenses.

• It is an impeachable offense precisely because it involves the exercise of a constitutionally created presidential power.

• The use of the pardon power in this case is a direct assault on core constitutional rights, statutory civil rights laws of the United States, and the authority of courts to enforce those laws.

• It therefore threatens constitutional civil liberties generally, as well as the viability of congressionally authorized statutory law, and it is a direct attack on the constitutional powers of the judiciary as a coordinate branch of government.

• Accordingly, this pardon threatens to undercut one of the indispensable, foundational norms of American constitutional order: the rule of law.

One could, of course, make some version of the foregoing argument about many presidential pardons. Every pardon undercuts a prior judicial decision and vitiates a court’s judgment that the defendant violated a criminal statute and ought to be punished. But here, as elsewhere in the impeachment realm, context and motive matter.

In deciding whether this pardon is impeachable, it matters that its effect is to devalue constitutional and statutory protections of a vulnerable minority. It matters that its effect (and rationally inferable purpose) is precisely to undercut the power of the judiciary to enforce the law against officials who believe they can violate it with impunity. And it matters that President Trump’s motive in issuing the pardon is so transparently political. This is not a considered judgment that a particular individual has been unfairly treated by corrupt judges, a flawed process, or an unjust law. It is, instead, a transparent pander to a politician’s political base.

The fact that the Constitution grants the president the theoretical power to behave in this way does not deprive Congress of the power to conclude that the exercise of that power is so contrary to constitutional principles and democratic norms that it constitutes an impeachable offense.

[T]he Republicans controlling both houses have so far shown no disposition to take these steps. But, should that political obstacle ever dissolve, there is now at least one constitutionally sound basis upon which impeachment could be based.