Mike Pence deserves every bit of criticism for his praise of Joe Arpaio

The vice president even said he was “honored” to be in the same room as Arpaio.

Pence is a great fool.

Arpaio is no champion of the rule of law. There’s certainly nothing honorable about him. Arpaio is an enemy of liberty, the law, and basic human decency. Pence should feel a deep, burning shame for claiming otherwise.

President Trump, the self-styled defender of “law and order,” may have pardoned the former sheriff for criminal contempt of court, showing the commander in chief is not above the sort of swampy back-scratching he promised to excise from the nation’s capital, but that won’t wash away the stench of Arpaio’s other offenses, of which there are many.

Consider this brief list:

• Arpaio’s posse framed an innocent man, using threats by a jailhouse snitch to entrap him in an assassination plot against Arpaio himself. The man was eventually awarded $1,102,528 in a taxpayer-funded settlement. But at the time of his arrest, Arpaio piously played the martyr for the TV cameras, as if his life had really been in danger.
• Arpaio once explained he was able to cut the cost of feeding his inmates down to just 30 cents per meal, meaning he was spending more money to feed his dogs. To slash costs, he eliminated salt and pepper from the menu and limited inmates to just two meals per day. On a related note, he also limited their television privileges to just C-SPAN, the Weather Channel and, “to aggravate their hunger,” the Food Network. It’s important to note here that many of Arpaio’s wards were simply awaiting trial and that they had not yet been convicted of any wrongdoing.
• Arpaio allowed hundreds of alleged child sex crimes, many of which involved underage girls, to go uninvestigated and unresolved. The public funds that were given to reinforce the sex-crimes unit were used instead on pet projects.
• The jails he oversaw experienced a disproportionately high number of inmate deaths, and no good explanation has ever been given for this. One inmate was even baked to death in a cell that left his corpse at 109 degrees, according to investigators.
• One pregnant inmate went into labor and had to wait more than four hours before the jail staff got her to a doctor. She lost her baby during childbirth. Another woman was awarded $200,000 in a settlement after the court found Arpaio’s men were “deliberately indifferent” to the risk posed by “[bounding] at her hands and ankles” and forcing her “to walk through the hospital where she was chained to other prisoners for transport back to jail” just two days after giving birth. These are just two examples in a long list of former inmates who allege “miscarriages, stillbirths, or harsh conditions for pregnant women” in Arpaio’s jails. They claim they received “poor medical care” or “no medical care” at all. These women, who were pregnant at the time of their jailing, also allege they experienced “rotten food, potentially contaminated water, a lack of prenatal vitamins, and careless detention officers contribute to the problems.”
• Arpaio hired a private detective to dig up compromising information on the wife of the judge who was deciding at the time whether to find the sheriff guilty of being in contempt of court.
• He had reporters arrested regularly for publishing unflattering stories. His office was ordered to pay the Phoenix New Times co-founders $3.75 million for multiple false arrests.

I’m not sure who Pence was talking about at that event in Tempe, because the Arpaio who held office in Maricopa County all those years is certainly no “tireless champion” of “the rule of law.” The real Arpaio is a vicious scofflaw whose decadeslong tenure as a so-called lawman should be defined by his relentless pursuit of personal gain, which was done at the the expense of those he was charged to serve and protect.