The GOP Has Become the Party of White Backlash

A column in the Washington Post by a former member of the George W. Bush White House asks if the GOP will become the party of white backlash.  Unfortunately, that transformation of the party has already become the reality of today's GOP when you look at the open racism of the current GOP occupant of the White House and candidates such as Corey Stewart here in Virginia who is running on an unabashedly racist platform - Stewart is likely having apoplexy over a decision by the Richmond Monument Avenue Commission to remove the monument to Jefferson Davis. Country club Republicans can whine and bristle at being called racists, but as long as they remain supporters of the GOP, they are in fact racists if not those marching carrying torches and Confederate flags. They are now known by the company they keep and, as the column points out, that company is pretty ugly.  As for moral considerations of open racism, the GOP threw away morality years ago when it allowed evangelical Christians - perhaps the most immoral force in American society if one looks beyond false and feigned piety - to hijack the party base.  Here are column highlights:

It should give the advocates of Trumpism — defined by some mix of protectionism, nativism and bitter resentment of elites — pause that the strongest advocates of the creed are some of the most frightening figures in American politics. I am not necessarily referring to the politicians Trump chooses to endorse in primaries — given that the president’s favor is more based on loyalty than ideology. I am talking about that subset of Republicans who take the ideals of Trumpism most seriously. People such as West Virginia Senate candidate Don Blankenship, who, before losing the primary, ran ads highlighting the Taiwanese heritage of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s wife. Or Iowa Rep. Steve King, who argues, “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” Or Arizona Senate candidate and former sheriff Joe Arpaio , known for extreme ethnic profiling, terrorist raids, and cruel and unusual punishment. Or Virginia Senate candidate Corey A. Stewart, who has associated with white supremacists and thrown his state party into turmoil.

The phenomenon of Republican extremism is hardly new. At the height of the tea-party movement, the GOP had candidate fitness crises in Nevada, Delaware, Colorado, Missouri and Indiana. But two things are now different. First, the GOP establishment is weaker than at any time I can remember. Second, the rhetoric of Trumpism is more explicitly racial than at any time I can remember.

For a party at its height of influence, Republicans remain in a tenuous position at the national level because of Trump. They lost the popular vote count by nearly 3 million in the 2016 presidential election, and Trump has done almost nothing to expand his appeal. Long-term demographic trends are running against the GOP, with the non-Hispanic white population declining from 76 percent to 63 percent over the past two decades and the country on track to be majority minority by 2045 .

The political challenge for the GOP, in the meantime, is to “seriously reduce immigration and encourage population growth within the country.” Which clearly means population growth in that portion of the country with less melanin.

The problem? Trump already won the white vote by more than 20 percentage points in 2016. So how does the GOP rack up even greater white support? If Trump’s political strategy is any indication, this will involve a relentless emphasis on race and immigration — on kneeling black athletes, on immigrants who “infest” our country, and on Muslims who are targeted for suspicion.

A strategy of feeding white backlash against a multicultural future worked for Trump — barely — in 2016. Will it work for Republicans in 2018 and 2020? Perhaps, if Democrats move precipitously to the left. But in the longer run, will Trumpism appeal to millennials (who now consistently give Trump around a 25 percent approval rating )? Will it work with suburban women?

And what are the moral implications of a political strategy that employs racial and ethnic antagonism as a motivating factor? Is this really the set of values that Republican leaders want their children to absorb? Will conservatives so easily abandon conservatism for white identity politics? It is an approach to public life that will indelibly stain all who employ it — and all who excuse it.

“This is the question for Republicans going forward,” Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report told me. “Will the GOP be defined not just as the party of Trump but as the party that’s hostile to non-whites?” And what if there is no difference?

Again, already there is no difference. Those still clinging to the GOP need to stand in front of a mirror and take a long look at themselves and decide whether they are racists or not.  If the answer is no, the only option is to flee the GOP and work for its defeat.  

Will Arizona Swing Blue in 2018?

Trump and anti-immigrant extremist Arpaio.

One of the big questions for 2018 is whether or not Hispanics and Millennials will turn out in force at the polls come November.  If they do, the 2018 midterms and other elections could be brutal for Republicans. Hopefully, Democrats across the country are replicating the ground game and get out the vote effort Virginia Democrats under Ralph Northam mounted in 2017.  One state that many pundits and party operatives are watching is Arizona, which among other things, has an open U.S.Senate seat.  Two of the would be GOP nominees are trying to out-Trump Der Trumpenführer when it comes to Hispanic bashing.  The other is swinging to the hard right to court the racist GOP base.  With luck, this primary will motivate Hispanics and Millennials to seek revenge in the November general election.  A piece in The Guardian looks at the dynamics in play in Arizona.  Here are excerpts:

With its growing population of young Hispanic voters, Arizona has long seemed a tempting prize for Democrats. Year after year, electoral success has eluded them. As the 2018 midterms approach, with Arizona one of the biggest political battlegrounds, Democrats are indefatigably optimistic.

Issues that animate liberals across the country – immigration, healthcare, education – are raging in Arizona. Last month, public school teachers walked out of their classrooms – and won salary increases and more funding for schools. The state is also at the center of the roiling debate over illegal immigration and border enforcement. It is home to Hispanics, 31% of the population, and suburban white voters who strongly disagree with Trump’s hardline politics.

Republicans outnumber Democrats in the state and have nearly twice as many precinct committee officials. But Democrats say their numbers have jumped since 2016 and the combined total of unaffiliated and third-party voters is greater than those for either party. Accordingly, the state Democratic party has launched a 15-county strategy to reach new voters across the states and especially independents.

Democrats say they are optimistic they can pick up at least one, possibly two congressional seats. They are also excited about the possibility of winning control of the state senate and insist they have a chance of unseating the Republican governor, Doug Ducey. The biggest prize of all is an open Senate seat that could determine control of the chamber. Republicans, of course, push back.
 Chuck Coughlin, a veteran Republican strategist, was less emphatic. Though he said too many Democrats were running as progressives in a state that is still conservative and waved off the chance of a defeat for Ducey, who negotiated the pay rise for teachers, he said the Senate seat, held by a conservative Republican since 1995, “clearly leans blue”.
 Immigration has already emerged as a defining issue of the battle for Arizona’s seat. The three Republican candidates have largely embraced Trump’s agenda – policies several party strategists quietly worry are too far right for the general election.

The Republican primary is a three-way contest between US congresswoman Martha McSally, a decorated air force veteran and party favorite; Kelli Ward, a former state senator and far-right conservative; and Arpaio, whom Trump pardoned after he was convicted of contempt of court for refusing to stop racially profiling Hispanics.

Democrats hope a nasty Republican primary will open the door to a first Democratic senator in a generation. US congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema, a “Blue Dog” centrist and the presumptive nominee, has positioned herself as an “independent voice” and consensus builder, willing to work across the aisle. While the Republicans vie to be seen as the most conservative, Coughlin said, Sinema is honing a positive, general-election message, in English and Spanish.
 McCain, the six-term Arizona senator who is fighting brain cancer at his ranch in Sedona, warns that Republicans are “on the wrong side” of the immigration debate and risk losing Latino voters for a generation.

“Most Arizona high school seniors are Hispanic,” McCain writes. “Do you think most of them would consider voting for the party that pulled their friends out of school, took them away from their teams and clubs and neighborhoods and put them on buses to Mexico?”

Joseph Garcia, director of the Morrison Institute Latino Public Policy Center at Arizona State University, said Latinos made up more than a fifth of the Arizona electorate in 2016 election but their influence was limited by low voter turnout.
 A study he worked on, however, found that by 2030 Arizona could become a “blue, progressive state”, in large part because of the Latino vote.

“The die is cast as far as changing demographics [go],” Garcia said. “It’s not hard to predict the future when you have the numbers.”

Mike Pence’s Hypocrisy Filled Sense of Morality

With Rudy Giuliani exposing Donald Trump as a liar - yet again - during an interview on Fox News, the bar for truthfulness and morality is almost non-existent in the Trump/Pence regime.  Yet, Mike Pence, who bizarrely won't be alone in a room with a woman who is not his wife, continues to manage to put the hypocrisy and feigned morality of evangelicals and so-called conservatives on display.  Perhaps one of Pence's most bizarre performances was his description of former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of contempt of court, as a “tireless champion of  the rule of law.”  The takeaway message is that trampling on the rights of minorities - especially those who have brown or black skin - is perfectly fine in the warped moral world of evangelicals.  This, of course, should surprise no one given the historical ties between evangelicals (especially Southern Baptists) and support for segregation and the Jim Crow laws.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Pence's upside down morality.  Here are excerpts:

Until Tuesday, it seemed that Vice President Pence had one primary function within the Trump administration: to be morally offended by everything. There was the time that he walked out of an NFL game because some players took a knee while the national anthem was played. 

Last month “the vice president walked out of the Summit of the Americas when Cuba’s foreign minister was recognized to speak after him,” according to the Associated Press.

Pence has demonstrated his ability to register his moral disapproval even when he does not leave an event. This was the case at the Opening Ceremonies of the 2018 Winter Olympics, when he refused to stand as the unified Korean team entered the stadium.

Pence’s defenders would argue that being rude to dignitaries from North Korea and Cuba just shows how righteous he really is. His brand is as a man of serious moral values who can serve as Trump’s envoy to people of faith.  Pence’s presence in the White House has been a boon for the religious right. Evangelical leaders across the country point to his record on abortion and religious freedom and liken him to a prophet restoring conservative Christianity to its rightful place at the center of American life. 

 

So it is worth noting what Pence, the Trump administration’s righteous man, did in Arizona on Tuesday. . . . . Pence praised former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of contempt of court, as a “tireless champion of … the rule of law” during an event in Arizona on Tuesday.

Pence said at the tax event that he was “honored” by the former sheriff’s attendance, and called Arpaio a “great friend of this president and tireless champion of strong borders and the rule of law,” to cheers from the crowd.

Needless to say, most observers do not view Joe Arpaio as a real big fan of the rule of law. Indeed, Arpaio probably would have fit right into either the Cuban or North Korean regimes. 

 

It is not just Arpaio’s victims who feel moral outage. The National Review editorialized in January: Arpaio was convicted of criminal contempt last summer for willfully violating a federal court order. Specifically, he was convicted of violating an order that he cease arresting and detaining people for whom there was no plausible criminal charge — i.e., the court asked him, pretty please, to stop detaining Mexicans for publicity purposes. 

 

But Sheriff Joe has a thing for arresting people who haven’t committed any crime. He arrested a Republican critic — the county supervisor — on trumped-up charges in 2008 and ended up handing over $3.5 million of taxpayers’ money in a wrongful-arrest settlement. 

 

Red State’s Sarah Quinlan offers up a detailed list of Arpaio’s abuses of the rule of law while he was the former sheriff, concluding: “Nothing about Sheriff Joe Arpaio resembles any sort of justice or law and order under the United States Constitution, and it is disgraceful for Pence to pretend otherwise.”

 

Note who I’m quoting here. These are conservative outlets one would expect to be in lockstep with a good Christian conservative like Pence. But they are appalled — and they are not the only conservatives to react this way. In these politically polarized times, Mike Pence has managed to appall just about everyone across the political spectrum. That takes some doing.

 

[T]he number of officials in the Trump administration who can claim to have preserved their moral bearings in this administration keeps shrinking by the day.

It is possible that the vice president reads this and cancels his Washington Post subscription in a fake moral outrage. It would be on brand for him. It would not change the fact that he has sullied his standing with this act of moral appeasement.

Trump's Indifference to the Rule of Law

It has been a week since Der Trumpenführer pardoned white supremacist Joe Arpaio who has  - as previously noted - a horrific record of abusing the civil rights of Hispanics and costing Maricopa County, Arizona many millions of dollars, yet the condemnations keep on coming from those who care about the rule of law and have a shred of empathy for other human beings.  The Arpaio pardon and Trump's anti-transgender ban directive - both announced a week ago - underscore the reality that Trump cares about only two elements in American society: (i) Christian extremists and (ii) white supremacists (as previously noted, from my tracking of Christian "family values" for over 20 years, the two groups significantly overlap).  The take away: Trump holds the rule of law and the civil rights of citizens he doesn't like in contempt.  In his latest column, Andrew Sullivan unloads on Trump - and by extension, his white supremacist and Christofascist supporters.  Here are excerpts:

Even a week later, the stench of it hangs in the air. The pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio is one of the more chilling authoritarian moves that Trump has made so far. I say this not simply because Arpaio treated prisoners in his charge in barbaric ways; not just because the president described this brutality as Arpaio simply “doing his job”; not even because Arpaio proudly and constantly engaged in racial profiling, making Latino citizens and noncitizens alike afraid to leave their own homes. I say it for a simpler reason: because it is Trump’s deepest indication yet that the rule of law means nothing to him.

Yes, the pardon power has been abused before — as any perusal of Bill Clinton’s final days in office will confirm. But it makes a difference, it seems to me, when the president pardons a law-enforcement officer for openly breaking the law, and refusing to abide by a court order to stop doing so. It makes an even bigger difference if the pardon is granted long before the legal process has played itself out. This isn’t a pardon, as is usually the case, for someone who has served time, shows contrition and deserves some kind of mercy. It is a pardon seemingly designed to blow a raspberry at the court system, and tell anyone in law enforcement or border control or ICE or anywhere for that matter that, if you commit brutal or illegal acts, the big man has your back.

This is government as an unaccountable, legally immune thug. Of course Trump telegraphed this in the campaign by backing violence against dissenters in his rallies, championing torture, and when he recently told police officers it was fine to manhandle criminal suspects. I still have a hard time imagining a president of the United States openly showing contempt for due process or basic decency; but here we are. No one could defend this — even National Review and The Wall Street Journal were disgusted. But say what you like about Trump, this attraction to brute force, this reveling in it, is something he has never hidden.

Is it also a signal that the president could pardon — even preemptively — anyone caught up in criminality in the Mueller investigation? I suspect so, even though Mueller subtly responded to that threat last Wednesday, by letting it be known he is working alongside Eric Schneiderman, the attorney general of New York. State crimes, after all, can’t be pardoned by the president.

An instinctual despot like Trump can find even the most benign of the president’s constitutional powers — the pardon — and turn it against the rule of law. We really need to remind ourselves of this on a daily basis if we are not to become numb to it: to advance his own interests, there is nothing this president would not do. If we enter, as we well might, a constitutional crisis, we have been warned all too clearly what this man is capable of.

Trump is Killing the GOP and Unmasking Its Well-Mannered White Supremacy

As I have disclosed numerous times, once upon a time I was a Republican activist.  That was years ago and before the GOP full embraced white supremacist (the two are usually synonymous from my experience).  Over the last 15 to 20 years the GOP has resorted more and more to dog whistle racism. Enter Trump and now the embrace of racism and bigotry is no longer hidden.  Indeed, between his post-Charlottesville comments and his pardon of Joe Arpaio, Der Trumpenführer has ripped away the veneer of the GOP's heretofore well-mannered white supremacy.   A piece by columnist David Brooks - a heretofore GOP apologist - in the New York Times and a story in USA Today look at the ugly reality of what the GOP has become and how, if we are lucky, Trump will kill the party.  First, excerpts from the Times column:

It’s ironic that race was the issue that created the Republican Party and that race could very well be the issue that destroys it.

The G.O.P. was founded to fight slavery, and through most of its history it had a decent record on civil rights. A greater percentage of congressional Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act than Democrats.

It’s become more of a white party in recent years, of course, and adopted some wrongheaded positions on civil rights enforcement, but it was still possible to be a Republican without feeling like you were violating basic decency on matters of race. Most of the Republican establishment, from the Bushes to McCain and Romney, fought bigotry, and racism was not a common feature in the conservative moment.

Between 1984 and 2003 . . . . In that time, I never heard blatantly racist comments at dinner parties, and there were probably fewer than a dozen times I heard some veiled comment that could have suggested racism. But the Republican Party has changed since 2005. It has become the vehicle for white identity politics. In 2005 only six percent of Republicans felt that whites faced “a great deal” of discrimination, the same number of Democrats who felt this. By 2016, the percentage of Republicans who felt this had tripled.

Recent surveys suggest that roughly 47 percent of Republicans are what you might call conservative universalists and maybe 40 percent are what you might call conservative white identitarians. White universalists believe in conservative principles and think they apply to all people and their white identity is not particularly salient to them. White identitarians are conservative, but their white identity is quite important to them, sometimes even more important than their conservatism.

According to a survey from the Public Religion Research Institute, for example, about 48 percent of Republicans believe there is “a lot of discrimination” against Christians in America and about 43 percent believe there is a lot of discrimination against whites. [T]hree things are clear: First, identity politics on the right is at least as corrosive as identity politics on the left, probably more so. If you reduce the complex array of identities that make up a human being into one crude ethno-political category, you’re going to do violence to yourself and everything around you. Second, it is wrong to try to make a parallel between Black Lives Matter and White Lives Matter. To pretend that these tendencies are somehow comparable is to ignore American history and current realities.

Third, white identity politics as it plays out in the political arena is completely noxious. Donald Trump is the maestro here. He established his political identity through birtherism, he won the Republican nomination on the Muslim ban, he campaigned on the Mexican wall, he governed by being neutral on Charlottesville and pardoning the racialist Joe Arpaio.

Each individual Republican is now compelled to embrace this garbage or not. The choice is unavoidable, and white resentment is bound to define Republicanism more and more in the months ahead. It’s what Trump cares about. And this is where the dissolution of the G.O.P. comes in. Conservative universalists are coming to realize their party has become a vehicle for white identity and racial conflict. This faction is prior to and deeper than Trump. Friendships are now ending across the right. People who supported Trump for partisan reasons now feel locked in to support him on race, and they are making themselves repellent.

It may someday be possible to reduce the influence of white identity politics, but probably not while Trump is in office. As long as he is in power the G.O.P. is a house viciously divided against itself, and cannot stand.

The USA Today piece continues where Brooks begins and looks at how the GOP has put its white supremacy into toxic policy.   Here are highlights:

A federal judge found last summer that the North Carolina Republican Party had passed voting restrictions that “target African Americans with almost surgical precision” in an effort to “impose cures for problems that did not exist.”  In other words, North Carolina’s GOP was trying to cure an epidemic of black people voting.

The ruling confirmed that conservatives in a crucial swing state had been engaging in unrepentant suppression of black voters — yet not one prominent Republican threatened to quit the GOP, as many had over the nomination of Donald Trump. There weren’t even vague condemnations of their own party’s resumption of this nation’s centuries-long effort to deny African-Americans the ballot.

But the same silence did not meet President Trump’s insistence this month that "many sides" were at fault for the violence at the “Unite the Right” protests in Charlottesville, Va., which left counter-protester Heather Heyer dead. Why has Trump’s comfort for white supremacists provoked bipartisan recriminations while the North Carolina’s GOP’s effort to deny black Americans the vote did not? Why are conservatives silent about reports that the Indiana GOP has limited early voting in urban areas while letting it flourish in suburban communities?

Perhaps Republicans know they get away with policies that enforce white supremacy through voting restrictions and mass incarceration, but to do this, they must reject public displays of bigotry. This unstated compromise is the heart of a strategy that has helped the party accumulate more political power than at any time since the Great Depression.

The Republican approach to white identity politics that has been reinforced in the last decade by adding new voting restrictions and more effective racial gerrymandering on top of felon disenfranchisement that combine to diminish the power of non-white voters. But it has been stoked for generations by an assault on public services that has fed by the dog whistle that “‘government’ equaled ‘coddling of nonwhites.” It’s just revealing that conservatives seem to summon outrage when a clerk says "Happy Holidays," but they can't find it when government excess victimizes someone who isn't white.

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. 

Arizona Republic: Trump Meant to Empower White Nationalsts

If one traces Donald Trump's history, it soon becomes obvious that the man is a racist and has been one for decades. Be it racial discrimination 40+ years ago in Norfolk, Virginia, his fanning of the birtherism insanity against Barack Obama, or his accusations against young blacks in New York City all of whom were acquitted of any wrong doing, the man has shown himself to be a bigot time and time again.  Hence, his effort to establish a false equivalence between white supremacists and Neo-Nazis as in contrast to those who oppose racism and fascism should come as no surprise.  Now, with his pardon on Joe Arpaio, a man who engaged in brutal civil rights abuses Hispanics, Phoenix's Arizona Republic, a leading Arizona newspaper is calling Trump out for what he is in fact and stating the obvious: Trump is seeking to empower white nationalists and Neo-Nazis.  Here are editorial highlights:

While America was talking about tearing down monuments that offend historically oppressed people, Donald Trump effectively erected yet another one.

His pardon of Joe Arpaio elevated the disgraced former Maricopa County sheriff to monument status among the immigration hardliners and nationalists in Trump’s base.  This erases any doubt about whether Trump meant to empower them after the violence in Charlottesville.

Arpaio is their darling. Arpaio is now back on his pedestal thanks to their president.  This insult wasn’t a surprise. Trump told us it was coming during his rally-the-base speech in Phoenix Tuesday.  But that doesn’t lessen the sting or diminish the significance of Trump’s decision to put Arpaio back on the national stage.

Maricopa County had a bellyful of this showboat sheriff and voted him out of office last year. A federal court found Arpaio in criminal contempt for ignoring a judge's order in a long-running case over racial profiling of Latino motorists.  It was a dose of hard-won justice for a too-flamboyant sheriff who showed little respect for the Constitution as he made national news as an immigration hardliner – and let real crimes go uninvestigated.

Donald Trump’s pardon elevates Arpaio once again to the pantheon of those who see institutional racism as something that made America great. Many will characterize it as a slap to the Latino community – and it is. The vast majority of Latinos in Arizona are not undocumented, yet they all fell under heightened scrutiny as Arpaio honed his image.

The pardon was a slap to those who worked through the judicial system to make Arpaio accountable, too. It robbed the people hurt by his policies of justice – even before a judge could mete out a sentence. The pardon was a sign of pure contempt for every American who believes in justice, human dignity and the rule of law.

Arpaio was riding high in 2010 when then-Gov. Jan Brewer signed Senate Bill 1070, a draconian law written to intimidate people. Then Arizona came to its senses. It recognized the dangers of scapegoating – or at least the economic risks of alienating a growing demographic group.

Then came Trump. He resurrected Arpaio’s rhetoric and made a hit on the national stage. He used Arpaio as a warm-up act during campaign rallies and modeled his own speeches on Arpaio’s rambling populist routine.

After Trump was elected, many hoped he would abandon his habit of appealing to the worst instincts of disaffected white Americans who have been left behind by economic changes that had little to do with undocumented immigration.  

Trump spent last week demonstrating that he wants to be president of the few.  By pardoning Arpaio, Trump made it clear that institutional racism is not just OK with him. It is a goal.  That should trouble every American who believes that our duty as a nation is to continue working on behalf of equal justice.

In another piece, the Arizona Republic looks at how the  Arpio pardon threatens the rule of law in America and gives us a preview of how Trump will use the pardon of family members and political cronies to thwart the Russiagate investigation.  What is most disturbing, is that a majority of Republicans support this trashing of the rule of law.  And let's not forget that evangelical Christians remain Trump's most loyal supporters.  Both groups have underscored their moral bankruptcy. 

Trump, Joe Arpaio and the End of Constitutional Rights

The Roman Republic did not end with one single act.  Rather numerous acts and the eventual seizure of power by Octavian Caesar - renamed Augustus - while maintaining the outward trappings of the Republic, in particular the Roman Senate led to the empire and imperial power.  Along the way the rule of law ended and some became above the law.  In pardoning Joe Arpaio, Der Trumpenführer has signaled that his supporters can trample on the constitutional rights of others with impunity.  John McCain issued a statement that sums up the danger well:

“No one is above the law and the individuals entrusted with the privilege of being sworn law officers should always seek to be beyond reproach in their commitment to fairly enforcing the laws they swore to uphold. Mr. Arpaio was found guilty of criminal contempt for continuing to illegally profile Latinos living in Arizona based on their perceived immigration status in violation of a judge’s orders. The President has the authority to make this pardon, but doing so at this time undermines his claim for the respect of rule of law as Mr. Arpaio has shown no remorse for his actions.”

The main editorial of the New York Times today follows up on this theme and the danger that Trump's action signals.  In the world of Trump and his racist, homophobic, anti-immigrant base, some people have rights and others don't, namely those who are black, Hispanic, non-Christian, and non-heterosexual.  As noted in numerous post, in the case of LGBT Americans, Trump is waging an unrelenting war against us.  It will likely only get worse if the trend is allowed to continue.  Here are editorial excerpts: 

It would be difficult for President Trump, who has insulted judges and tried to interfere with a federal investigation, to show much more disrespect for the rule of law. But if he makes good on his implicit vow to pardon Joe Arpaio, the disgraced former sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., Mr. Trump would be scorning the Constitution itself.

Mr. Arpaio, an anti-immigrant hard-liner who served 24 years in office before voters tossed him out last November, was convicted in July of criminal contempt of court for disregarding a federal judge’s orders to stop detaining people based solely on the suspicion that they were in the country illegally.

The Constitution gives the president nearly unlimited power to grant clemency to people convicted of federal offenses, so Mr. Trump can pardon Mr. Arpaio. But Mr. Arpaio was an elected official who defied a federal court’s order that he stop violating people’s constitutional rights. He was found in contempt of that court. By pardoning him, Mr. Trump would show his contempt for the American court system and its only means of enforcing the law, since he would be sending a message to other officials that they may flout court orders also.

Mr. Arpaio could not be less deserving of mercy. In addition to the dragnets of Hispanic-looking people that ultimately led to his contempt conviction, he racked up a record of harassment, neglect, mistreatment and other flagrant abuses of office that should have ended his career years ago.

Both men [Trump and Arpaio] built their brands by exploiting racial resentments of white Americans. While Mr. Trump was beginning his revanchist run for the White House on the backs of Mexican “rapists,” Mr. Arpaio was terrorizing brown-skinned people across southern Arizona, sweeping them up in “saturation patrols” and holding them in what he referred to as a “concentration camp” for months at a time.

It was this behavior that a federal judge in 2011 found to be unconstitutional and ordered Mr. Arpaio to stop. He refused, placing himself above the law and the Constitution that he had sworn to uphold.

[A] grant of mercy from Mr. Trump would also go against longstanding Justice Department policy, which calls for a waiting period of at least five years before the consideration of a pardon application and some expression of regret or remorse by the applicant. Mr. Arpaio shows no sign of remorse; to the contrary, he sees himself as the victim. “If they can go after me, they can go after anyone in this country,” he told Fox News on Wednesday. He’s right — in a nation based on the rule of law, anyone who ignores a court order, or otherwise breaks the law, may be prosecuted and convicted.

Mr. Arpaio has always represented what Mr. Trump aspires to be: a thuggish autocrat who enforces the law as he pleases, without accountability or personal consequence.

  Frighteningly, we are seeing the death of the rule of law before our eyes.  Be very afraid.