Sorry, blocked from NYT for this month.

I haven't gotten that far.)

One bit of the article: 'In short, under the Constitution one cannot be deprived of liberty without a court ruling upon the legality of the detention. The power of courts to restrain government officers from depriving citizens of liberty absent judicial process is the only meaningful way courts have to enforce important constitutional protections. But if the president can employ the pardon power to circumvent constitutional protections of liberty, there is very little left of the constitutional checks on presidential power.

I am not suggesting that the pardon power itself provides for a due process exception. To the contrary, on its face the pardon power appears virtually unlimited. But as a principle of constitutional law, anything in the body of the Constitution inconsistent with the directive of an amendment is necessarily pre-empted or modified by that amendment. If a particular exercise of the pardon power leads to a violation of the due process clause, the pardon power must be construed to prevent such a violation.

I admit that this is a novel theory. There’s no Supreme Court decision, at least that I know of, that deals specifically with the extent to which the president may employ his pardon power in this way.

But if the president can immunize his agents in this manner, the courts will effectively lose any meaningful authority to protect constitutional rights against invasion by the executive branch. This is surely not the result contemplated by those who drafted and ratified the Fifth Amendment, and surely not the result dictated by precepts of constitutional democracy. All that would remain to the courts by way of enforcement would be the possibility of civil damage awards, hardly an effective means of stopping or deterring invasions of the right to liberty.'

Arpaio has been nailed for contempt of court.

That's not a statutory violation of law, that is a remedy within the inherent powers of the court.

Whether a pardon could apply to contempt of court is an unknown.

He had a well-documented problem with alcohol. There are a couple of good "live" recordings of The Doors, but more than a few of the "official" albums released posthumously by the band under the "Bright Midnight" banner are almost unlistenable, because he sounds like a raging alcoholic.

On the live version of "Roadhouse Blues" (taken from a Philadelphia concert in 1970), which appeared first on "Absolutely Live" and was then repackaged on the expanded "In Concert," he tells the audience at the end of the song:

...and that's Trump.

He lives for division, controversy, and attention from the media.

If he pardons Arpaio, he'll get all of that, and that is the beginning and the end of his list of concerns.

Goes hand in hand with his "suggestions" a few weeks ago that the police need to be less gentle with guilty people. He is letting them know that restricting court orders will be overturned with pardons if you are on his side.
Check off one more big box on the road to Facism.