By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Commenting on President Trump’s pardon of former Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio for misdemeanor criminal contempt of court, national conservative radio talk host Mark Levin raised the question on August 28 of what are people supposed to do when judges themselves defy the Constitution.
Dominant media’s slant assumed that Arpaio actually was a “racist” who broke the law by policing against massive illegal immigration.
But what if he was the victim of judicial manipulation that’s familiar to Arizonans who suffer under a corrupt open-borders establishment willing to destroy even prominent officials in the Grand Canyon State who don’t follow its line?
Perhaps illustrating why Trump won the presidency after so many voters hoped he’d defy the elite, the Manhattan billionaire went right ahead to pardon the sheriff despite grim shouts through the media megaphone not to do so. If he dared, Trump was warned, he’d only further prove the “racism” that dominant media had invented to pin on him.
By coincidence, on August 28 black scholar Shelby Steele wrote of the reason leftists use accusations of “racism” to bludgeon people — it empowers them to sit in judgment of others, thinking how good they are as they “grant or deny moral legitimacy across society.”
Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Steele said leftists “have a hunger for racism that is almost craven,” adding later that they find “sweetness at the news of racism” as a tool they can use. “Racism and bigotry generally are the great driving engines of modern American liberalism,” Steele wrote.
On the wider front of various issues in recent decades, U.S. conservatives and moderates have seen powerful lawless judges simply impose their own disordered “progressive” policy preferences that clearly have no support in established law or the Constitution.
The most prominent would be the U.S. Supreme Court’s sudden sweeping invention of a previously unknown fundamental constitutional right to permissive abortion. Justice Byron White, one of the two dissenters against the January 22, 1973, usurpation, said the court simply was flexing its “raw judicial power” against the Constitution.
But dominant media loved the assault, and this actual shocking defiance of the rule of law was hailed in waves of news-twisting propaganda. When liberal judges and editors decide that “the times demand” unjustified rupture with current law, their stampeding hobnailed boot prints over Americans’ prone bodies are considered all the justification that’s needed.
The Supreme Court’s blatant word-twisting in order to uphold unconstitutional Obamacare was another major example, as was the court’s pretense that the U.S. Constitution somehow mysteriously required sudden federal imposition of “same-sex marriage.”
Liberal social warriors blast through the country like hurricanes, and if anyone else dare resist, she’s condemned in a howl as a “culture warrior” for not immediately surrendering all that’s dear.
Still, the ferocity of leftists being denied even a fraction of their agenda can surprise some experienced conservative activists. The same evening that Trump pardoned Arpaio, August 25, The Wanderer asked Arizona Republican campaign consultant Constantin Querard for his reaction in a bit, after the situation had a little time to develop. Querard quickly replied, “I wouldn’t expect too much overreaction.”
However, on August 28 Querard confessed he’d been caught off guard after international left-wing animosity exploded. “Well, I was certainly wrong about not expecting too much overreaction,” Querard said. “They’re losing their minds every day!”
Nothing was too harsh to say against a sheriff and president who simply asked that border law be obeyed. Editors seemed to have decided they’d print any venom, no matter how vile.
The left-wing UK Guardian allowed U.S. pundit Gustavo Arellano to conclude his opinion piece by hoping that Trump and Arpaio find themselves “gagging on green bologna sandwiches under the unforgiving sun, rotting in their own fetid hate.”
Ah yes, the mighty forces of left-wing love and tolerance quickly are shown to contain no love and zero tolerance when tested.
The Arpaio-loathing Arizona Republic, the state’s biggest daily, used the large majority of its entire broadsheet-size editorial page to rage against Trump and the former sheriff on August 26, calling the pardon, among other things, “an endorsement of institutional racism” and “a sign of pure contempt for every American who believes in justice, human dignity, and the rule of law.”
The oppressive headline dominating the page was, “A monument to oppression.”
The Republic is long-practiced in trying to destroy whomever it pleases, and becomes very unpleasant if a targeted victim dares resist.
Querard, although a conservative political consultant, doesn’t simply endorse whatever may be popular on the right.
Asked by The Wanderer to describe himself, he replied in the third person that “it’s fair to say that he’s not someone who slavishly loves everything Donald Trump does as president. That’s why he is often viewed as a fair judge in these debates” over political issues. Querard ran Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R., Texas) presidential campaign in Arizona.
Still, Querard expressed a belief common here — but anathema to dominant media — that Arpaio had been railroaded by the legal system.
“Trump was right to pardon Arpaio, not for any partisan reason, but because the case involved a career law-enforcement officer who was also a constitutionally elected sheriff, who faithfully executed the law as written,” Querard said.
Barack Obama’s highly politicized Department of Justice gave the green light to take down Arpaio.
The sheriff was chased down by federal Judge G. Murray Snow — a judge whose own wife’s words reportedly revealed his strong bias, although Snow refused to recuse himself. Then he was convicted in a bench trial by Federal Judge Susan Bolton, the very judge who put on hold Arizona’s popular new law against illegal immigration in 2010, SB 1070. Arpaio supported that law.
“The first judge disagreed with federal and state immigration law and ordered the sheriff to not enforce the law,” Querard said. “The sheriff continued to enforce the law, and the second judge found him guilty of violating the first order. So he got in trouble for keeping his oath and doing his job.
“Everything about this has been about punishing and smearing a sheriff the left loathes,” Querard said. “Remember all the time and money wasted on prosecuting a misdemeanor in this case, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of just how badly the left wanted to get him.
“We have a legal system that has safeguards because we believe — as tragic as it is for a guilty man to go free — it is a far greater tragedy for an innocent man to be wrongly convicted. I feel much the same way about political figures,” he said.
“As wrong as it is for someone to escape prosecution because of their political affiliation or beliefs, it is far worse to have someone prosecuted because of their political affiliation or beliefs,” Querard added. “Our system cannot survive that behavior if it becomes widespread or accepted.”
Tyranny From The Left
Expressing a similar view that Arpaio was the victim of a politicized judiciary, conservative GOP Phoenix activist Rob Haney told The Wanderer: “Justice was well served when President Trump pardoned Sheriff Arpaio. The irony is that we can no longer expect to receive justice through our courts. The left has politicized the judiciary, just as they have the rest of society.
“We can thank God that legal organizations such as Alliance Defending Freedom, Judicial Watch, the Thomas More Society and the American Center for Law and Justice have risen to protect us from our government,” said Haney, a retired chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Party.
“The Founders divided the government into three branches with the intent of preventing a tyrannical ruling class, but the Democrats and the Republicans in Name Only (RINOs) have united to promulgate tyranny from the left,” he said.
“Arpaio was persecuted for defending our citizens against a corrupt Obama justice system that would not enforce our immigration laws,” Haney said. “Now members of what could be called ‘The Cabal of Betraying RINOs,’ led by Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake and (House) Speaker Paul Ryan, have attacked Trump for his unwavering pursuit of justice.”
On August 1 Rachel Alexander, a senior editor at The Stream website, recalled: “Arpaio asked Snow repeatedly to recuse himself from the case due to bias. Snow refused. In 2013, a woman told Arpaio over Facebook that she overheard Judge Snow’s wife saying that Snow hated Arpaio and didn’t want him to be re-elected.”
The Wanderer reported these accusations against Snow’s impartiality in 2015 in stories in its hardcopy editions of May 7 (p. 3A), May 14 (p. 8B), and June 4 (p. 4B).
That May 14 story, headlined “Up On His High Bench, Judge Snow Can’t See Border Chaos As He Hounds Arpaio,” noted that the true believers among Arizona’s open-borders elite were shoving border enforcers out of the way.
“In recent years these believers successfully contrived to recall an Arizona Senate president and disbar a former chief prosecutor of Maricopa County, both of whom were known for strongly opposing massive illegal immigration, and were made to pay an unjust price,” The Wanderer story said. “Arpaio is the last standing member of this border-protecting triumvirate.”
Snow was determined to decide that traffic stops by deputies constituted illegal racial profiling even though illegal immigrants, Alexander wrote, “are more likely to commit traffic infractions. A large number of them have not learned U.S. traffic laws. They have less money, so are more likely to have something wrong with their cars. This prompts the police to pull them over. Judge Snow refused to consider these facts.”
Alexander, an Arizonan, briefly represented Arpaio as one of his attorneys in 2010.
Crazed Dogs
Northern California conservative commentator Barbara Simpson, who had Arpaio as a repeated guest on her San Francisco radio program, also took the view the sheriff was punished for following immigration law.
“Most simply, his ‘crime’ was that he allegedly ordered his deputies to use racial profiling in their traffic stops. Keep in mind, back in 2008 when this started, Arizona illegal immigration was at a record high and so was crime. His deputies carried out a crackdown to bring law and order to the area,” Simpson told The Wanderer.
“He was so successful that he aroused the ire of the ACLU, MALDEF, the Obama Justice Department, and ultimately his opposition gained millions of dollars from George Soros, which enabled Arpaio’s opponent in the last sheriff’s election to beat him,” she said. “They were like crazed dogs who refused to give up on their effort to destroy Joe.
“It’s not that easy. He really is a patriot. He’s from an immigrant family. He respects the law, and the people he has served over his long career — he’s 85 years old now — respect him for that,” Simpson said. “He has seen what illegal immigration has done to his county, state, and this country and believes we have an obligation to protect our country.
“Over the years, I interviewed Joe several times on my talk-radio program and found him to be open and to the point, with no political BS. My audience loved hearing him. It was clear he said what he believed, and it was an honest assessment of the problems law enforcement faces in Arizona,” she said.
“To give you an idea of his humanity, I had him scheduled for my program when I learned bluntly from station management that my program had been canceled. I called Joe’s office to tell them, and his assistant was so concerned. She worried that my show was dropped because I had scheduled the sheriff,” Simpson said.
“I assured her that was not the case and thanked her profusely for her concern. Let me tell you, there are few, if any, people in the news who would have reacted that way,” she said.
“Donald Trump called Sheriff Joe Arpaio a real patriot,” Simpson said. “So do I, and so do patriotic Arizona citizens. Joe says he’s not going anywhere. I can’t wait!”
Conservative Republican Arizona state Sen. Steve Montenegro, a legal immigrant from El Salvador, also questioned the propriety of the court action against Arpaio, telling CNN that “you have here an 85-year-old man who, frankly, has served his country since he was 18. And the best the left can come up with after they do political persecution on him is a misdemeanor, who even then that was, I don’t think — I don’t believe that was done correctly through the judicial process.”
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