On Tuesday, as Vice President Mike Pence delivered an address to a supportive group in Tempe, Ariz., he remarked on the presence of Joe Arpaio, the recently pardoned convict and former sheriff of Maricopa County.
“A great friend of this president, a tireless champion of strong borders and the rule of law,” Pence said dramatically, as if announcing him for an episode of “This is Your Life.” “Sheriff Joe Arpaio, I’m honored to have you here.”
It’s bad enough that President Trump pardoned Arpaio, who while still sheriff was found liable for arresting journalists in nighttime raids at their homes on fake charges just because they had given him unflattering news coverage. It’s even worse that Pence would offer such warm praise for someone so dishonest, so harmful to the image of law enforcement everywhere, and so anti-conservative in his belief in his own unlimited authority.
Trump campaigned on a law-and-order platform in 2016. There was something to be said for that at a time when violent crime was disturbingly ticking upward, as it now has two years in a row. Most law enforcement officials in the U.S. are both well-intentioned and effective, and in 2016 they found themselves under ideological and sometimes fatal physical attacks just for doing their jobs.
But lawmen like Arpaio, who abuse their power and embrace a philosophy of government unchained, are part of the problem. Pence is simply wrong to call him or anyone like him a friend of the rule of law, because his career is one of undermining the rule of law.
Some people probably still think of Arpaio as the tough-guy sheriff who forced inmates to live in a no-frills, tent-city jail. But Arpaio, whose rough treatment of inmates may have caused multiple pregnant women to suffer miscarriages, is also a man willing to abuse his power for personal gain. He once pretended for the media that he had been the object of a dramatic bombing assassination plot. It actually turned out to be an entrapment scheme hatched by Arpaio’s own office, which ultimately cost taxpayers a million-dollar settlement for the weak-minded inmate who had been coaxed and threatened into committing a crime.
That’s not the rule of law. That’s lawlessness.
As sheriff, Arpaio knowingly defied orders from a federal judge, leading to the criminal contempt charge for which he had to be pardoned. When ordered to stop, he continued routinely detaining people who looked Hispanic on mere suspicion that they might have violated immigration law, even in cases where there was no evidence that this or any other crime had occurred.
Arpaio’s brand of law enforcement is the executive-branch version of what Trump is always complaining that liberal judges do. Just as those judges cook up whatever nonsensical legal justification they need to reach their intended conclusion, so does a bad sheriff nonsensically justify his own authority to break whatever laws he must in order to hold everyone else accountable.
Because government holds such great power over the individual, the cost of such lawless and arrogant hypocrisy in a lawman can be counted in the number of lives he ruins, and in Arpaio’s case the number is probably very high.
Pence’s mistake of substance was only compounded by the fact that it was also a political error. Arpaio is also a long-shot Senate candidate this year. He’s very likely to lose Republicans a Senate seat if he wins the primary this August. If Pence’s quasi-endorsement of the disgraced former lawman wins the Republican primary in late August, the president of the Senate will be fully repaid for his unwise words.
