Day 219: Trump Uses Hurricane as Cover For Detestable Decisions
Arpaio gets his pardon, transgender military members get the boot.
With a Category 4 hurricane bearing down on Texas, and the eyes on the nation focused on a natural disaster of epic proportions, Donald Trump chose to pardon Joe Arpaio, the former Maricopa County sheriff who was found guilty by a federal court of, according to the ACLU, “deliberately violat[ing] an earlier court ruling that ordered his department to end its practice of illegally detaining people based only on suspicions about their immigration status.”
In other words, Arpaio, in derivation of federal law, was racial profiling Latino residents, even after he had been ordered by a judge to stop. (It’s also important to note that as an elected county official, enforcing federal law would fall outside his expected scope of employment due to the idea of federalism. If the federal government wants to have federal laws, it’s their obligation to police and enforce those laws, not local governments.)
Arpaio, 85, is far from a saint. The Phoenix New Times threaded a number of their articles about him over the last 20+ years, and it’s worth a sobering read. A sample:
The exact reasons for Trump’s pardon are unclear — he said it was because Arpaio kept “Arizona safe” — but this is yet another example of his decades-old belief that police officers are right no matter what. Here’s a crooked sheriff, running a county like it was medieval times and everyone therein was a serf, who was found guilty of intentionally ignoring an order from a federal court telling him to stop misapplying the law. In what has been a pattern, Trump’s pardon, yet again, seeks to undercut the judicial system.
With Hurricane Harvey gaining strength in the Gulf of Mexico, Trump also moved forward with his previously-announced ban on transgender individuals from serving in the military.
Trump told men and women willing to put on the uniform and risk their lives for this country, “Nah, we don’t want you anymore.” This will boot thousands of honorable Americans from the armed forces and has drawn bipartisan rebuke. The ACLU has vowed to sue over the decision.
The Arpaio pardon and transgender ban have one thing in common: they weaken the idea that everyone be treated equally. Arpaio treated people with brown skin as a suspect class. The military ban treats transgender individuals as incapable of service.
While all of this was happening, Texas was getting hit by early bands of the storm and Trump seemed almost giddy.
He promised that the federal government was ready to assist in any way they could.
The problem, of course, is that Trump has sat on his hands for months, and heads of various vital departments have not been installed.
The Trump administration has been preparing for months for what is forecast to be an especially active hurricane season, but Harvey is also gusting toward the US amid questions about vacancies in key administration posts — including the helm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the US Coast Guard, also is without a permanent leader after Trump’s decision to pluck retired Gen. John Kelly from his post atop DHS to become his White House chief of staff. Kelly’s deputy, Elaine Duke, has since taken the helm as acting secretary.
No permanent head of NOAA. No permanent head of DHS.
It would be ideal if Trump was as concerned about Americans’ safety as he was about a racist, octogenarian, law-breaking birther and what’s under the uniforms of honorable Americans serving in the military.
219 days in, 1243 to go
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