“My position on the pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio is that it was a reasonable exercise of the president’s pardon power. Not pardoning the sheriff would also have been reasonable, in my opinion. Indeed, as I said in my post on the subject, I don’t like presidential pardons. Absent overwhelming evidence that the person getting the pardon did not commit the offense for which he was convicted, my preference is no pardon. The Arpaio pardon does not meet that standard.

However, Arpaio’s offense arises from his efforts to combat a serious problem of lawlessness – illegal immigration – that the federal government refused to take seriously. Arpaio was filling a void created by the feds, a void that inflicted hardship on the people Arpaio was elected to serve.

In addition, political animus by those who opposed Arpaio’s efforts to fill the void left by the feds appears to have driven the legal case against him. When a public servant is punished in significant part for being on one side of a political/policy dispute, it doesn’t seem unreasonable for a president on the other side to pardon him.

Ron Rotunda, a distinguished attorney and law professor, informs me via email of certain facts that reinforce my view that partisan politics drove the case against Arpaio and, indeed, resulted in an unfair trial in the case that produced the order Arpaio later was convicted of violating. I believe readers will be interested in what Rotunda has to say.”

What Rotunda says is basically that Arpaio’s conviction was a judicial hit-job, and gives evidence to support his assertion – none of this will ever make the evening news, of course.

Here’s another interesting article by Rotunda, about how all people are equal in the Orwellian use of the word.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/sep/28/ronald-rotunda-sonya-sotomayor-do-as-i-say-not-as-/

“How would you like a free butler, maid, chef and chauffeur? Try that and the Department of Labor will sue you for violating the minimum wage, overtime and record-keeping requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act –unless you are Justice Sonia Sotomayor. That’s right. Since 2010, she has hired unpaid interns as her servants. No other justice does this.”

Those laws should made by the Legislative body, though, not the courts.

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2017/08/28/conservatism-is-not-a-suicide-pact-n2373543

I’m kind of warming up to this guy.

The John Doe cases were truly execrable.

I fear that most of the problem for us “viewers” is that so much of what happens is not really accessible to us for rational analysis. News is “controlled” from both sides (and there really aren’t just two — we collapse all the factions for simplicity).

Pardons appear to now be just another weapon in the partisan wars.

However, so far as I can tell, the pardon power is uniquely and entirely at the discretion of the President; departmental rules are rules – not statutes or Constitutional provisions; and poster children are in the eye of the beholder.

I take no position on his alleged activities pro or con, but Arpaio is exactly what some people want to rally around.

“Obama also granted some inappropriate pardons …
But no amount of “Whataboutism” makes it okay for Trump to disregard the rule of law for his friends.

America needs tougher immigration enforcement. But enforcement, like all government action, needs to follow the precepts of law and order.”
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/trump-once-the-law-and-order-candidate-embraces-lawless-disorder-with-arpaio-pardon/article/2632672

It is also normal practice for the POTUS to consult the DOJ on pardons. It seems from initial reports that, he may not have. Though not legally required, the reason for doing so is to distance the POTUS from accusations of abuse of power.
.

As far as “rule of law” is concerned, it should go both ways.

We might not like the laws that have come to be, but having LE officer deciding which ones he should ignore and which ones he’d like to have and chooses then to enforce (on the scale Arpaio has) is problematic to say the least.

Now, I don’t know how true all the items are in that Atlantic article, but it seems to me that Arpaio has some heavy questions surrounding him with respect to which and how he chooses to enforce the laws, and a court order is part of that law.
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I’m all for making a political statement about how our borders have been poorly managed, and am sympathetic to those making such a case being subject to a “political” prosecution.

In Arpaio’s case, it seems that there may well be a huge mixed bag, making it hard to see that he is purely a victim of a political witch hunt.

IOW, if the POTUS is looking to make a political statement with using a pardon, Arpaio’s not exactly the poster child for immigration enforcement we would want to be rallying around to make a stand on immigration on.

When it comes to egregious and unjust political prosecution, the John Doe cases in Wisconsin seems to much better at fitting the bill of the types of things to rally on.

When was the sentence first imposed (because anything after that is appellate, and doesn’t count)?

And do “Department rules” bind the President, or just a pardons board taking an advisory role?

In any event, see the above on “rule of law” for explaining the hypocrisy in picking at motes and ignoring the beams.

I do recommend doing a little research, from an unbiased source (if any are to be found) as to why Joe A. was in legal trouble in the first place. Eye opening.

Ann Says:
August 26th, 2017 at 4:42 pm
If anyone here is interested, this piece in The Atlantic provides some details on the kind of stuff Arpaio has done.

* * *
“we’re never racially profiled” is untrue on the face of it.
Everyone is “racially profiled” by every one they meet; it’s how we form first impressions (for good or bad) and you will never eliminate it.

You could add “negatively” to the sentence, and that might be true in the past (if you aren’t a Texas hick or an Appalachian hillbilly), but it certainly is not true now.

Deriding “white privilege” and decreeing “white-free campus days” and attacking white men with “Nazi haircuts” (actually standard US military, but who expects a Leftist thug to know that detail?) sure looks like “racial profiling” to me.

And it can be argued that the enforcement of laws (many of them “minor” but some of them “major”) against white citizens, while ignoring the same laws when violated by non-white non-citizens, is also racial profiling (see below, and any of Victor David Hanson’s stories from California; plus many recent headlines about sanctuary city anti-law policies and how they get people killed).

Here’s the “little research” and “some details” as requested, as showing on the other movie screen.
Dyer may not be totally unbiased (who is?), but she is totally professional and thorough.

It’s long and detailed, and examines the actual case and conviction, not the allegations and innuendos.
This is another example of the blatant Lawfare engaged in by Obama’s DOJ and his weaponized judges.

http://libertyunyielding.com/2017/08/28/trumps-pardon-arpaio-rule-law-event-unlike-immigration-enforcement-since-1965/

It has been laughable to see the left erupt in sanctimonious fury over Donald Trump’s pardon of former Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The theme of the eruption is that the presidential pardon violates the rule of law principle. Anyone who endorses the pardon, we are told, forfeits his good standing with the Rule of Law Brigade, and Republicans should be ashamed of themselves.

Of course, a presidential pardon is, in every sense, a rule of law action. The president is empowered by the U.S. Constitution to issue pardons. I thought it was unconscionable of Barack Obama to commute the sentence of FALN terrorist and murderer Oscar Lopez-Rivera, but I wouldn’t pretend he was violating the rule of law by doing it…
Interestingly, meanwhile, if you asked most critics what Arpaio was convicted of, they couldn’t tell you. They’d probably say something vague about “profiling.” That’s what all the headlines have been proclaiming,

But when you review the history, you find that Arpaio was not convicted of profiling. He was found guilty by a federal judge, in July 2017, of criminal contempt of court for failing to comply with another judge’s order in a 2007 civil case. The contempt crime is a misdemeanor for which the maximum sentence is six months in jail.

…

Something the sudden rule-of-law zealots don’t mention is that the MCSO crackdown was not only requested by members of the community, but was based on deputization by ICE under provision 287(g) of the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act, as amended by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (adopted, obviously, during the Clinton administration)….

The zealots also fail to mention that the finding of “profiling” came in the 2007 civil suit, which was brought by legal activists representing a handful of legal-status plaintiffs in what they hoped would become a lucrative class-action case. …
The criminal conviction of Arpaio was not for “profiling”; it was for allegedly failing to comply with elements of the judge’s 2011 order to cease the MCSO crackdown measures.

Even that element of the story has its murky aspect. …the judge in the criminal proceeding, Susan Bolton, refused to put the matter to a jury trial, as Arpaio requested, ordering a bench trial instead. (Because the crime in question is a misdemeanor, the judge had that discretion.) It can at least be reasonably suspected that Bolton didn’t want to risk a jury’s statistical likelihood of finding for the law enforcement officers, in a matter of gray-area questions and interpretation.

There’s one other thing the sudden rule-of-law zealots won’t tell you. Consider that this legal process started in 2007, with the civil suit against Arpaio. Arpaio and the MCSO were operating under the 287(g) program at the time, with widespread approval from the public. What happened between then and today to put the MCSO in such bad odor with the federal government?

The Obama administration took over. It initiated a Justice Department investigation of Arpaio and the MCSO almost immediately, in March 2009. It terminated the MCSO participation in the 287(g) “task force” program with ICE in October of 2009 — and that withdrawal of cooperation became a key element of Murray Snow’s December 2011 finding that the MCSO was acting outside its authority by “profiling” in order to identify illegal migrants. …

Snow’s 2011 injunction was issued in response to the 2007 civil suit. But it folded in MCSO actions from after the 287(g) termination, by a new administration, two years later. It also referenced findings from the Obama DOJ investigation, which had been started in the interim between the 2007 lawsuit and the 2011 ruling. …
With Judge Snow’s federal monitoring decree in operation, it was arguably overkill to pursue Arpaio in first a civil contempt case, and then a criminal one, for actions taken by the MCSO prior to the decree.

That said, however, the political trend of the Obama administration isn’t at issue only in the eventual contempt convictions for Arpaio.

…
According to U.S. immigration law, none of the people whom Arpaio and sheriffs across the country routinely find to be here illegally are supposed to be here at all. The American people understand their immigration law to mean what it says, and to be enforceable on that honest, straightforward basis.

Yet it has not been enforced on an honest, straightforward basis. The Obama administration is by no means the only culprit; ..
There is hardly any posture less suitable for lecturing others on the rule of law than that of favoring lax immigration enforcement. … If not for the refusal to enforce our immigration laws, for example, many Americans would be better disposed toward increasing legal immigration. …
But failing to honor the rule of law in immigration enforcement has fatally polluted that dialogue, along with many others. It has also soured many people of goodwill on the prospects of the rule of law in general.
…
The failure of rule-of-law enforcement for our immigration laws is a moral cancer eating away at the spirit of unity, common expectations, and civic equality in this country. If anyone should think shame on themselves, it’s the people who advocate for gutting the rule of law in immigration enforcement, and then pretend to care about the rule of law when it comes to pardoning Joe Arpaio.

A waiver of any portion of the waiting period is rarely granted and then only in the most exceptional circumstances.”
https://www.justice.gov/pardon/application-forms

How long has it been for Arpaio?

I’m not sympathetic to how the federal government had been lax on managing the borders and immigration, and have been sympathetic to Arizona’s attempt to redress the gap in immigration enforcement (as I recall they had a law overturned).

I haven’t followed this case much at all, but from the article that Ann linked (thanks), if only some of it is true, wow!

Is there an unbiased source that verifies all that?
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It sure seems to trod down the “two wrongs make a right” path – essentially Cornhead’s argument boiled down.

Frankly, if what that article describes is true, while the case may be deemed “political”, a pardon essentially also signals some kind of approval / endorsement behind the ethics of those actions.

Is that what we want to associate with enforcing the border?

Maybe the Arpaio case is not the hill to make a stand on, especially in light of the Charlottesville fiasco – again, if some of those items are true in the article.