sheriff2 bak

see mack

see const sheriffs

sheriff619

no lnx

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AN 6 25

This Saturday, June 14, the No Kings movement will be holding large protests all over the United States — from Seattle to Chicago to Philadelphia — to express opposition to President Donald Trump's military parade. And Brevard County, Florida Sheriff Wayne Ivey, a far-right MAGA Republican, is drawing vehement condemnation for remarks that critics say are threatening nonviolent protesters with violence.

At a press conference on June 12, Ivey told reporters, "If you spit on us, you're going to the hospital and in jail. If you hit one of us, you're going to the hospital and jail. And most likely get bitten by one of our big, beautiful dogs that we have here. If you throw a brick, a firebomb or point of gun at one of our deputies, notifying your family where to collect your remains at. Because we will kill you, graveyard dead. We're not going to play."

Ivey's comments are drawing a lot of negative reactions on X, formerly Twitter.

The Grio tweeted, "Florida Sheriff Wayne Ivey had quite the message for protesters expected to hit the streets ahead of an anti-Trump rally on Saturday: 'We will kill you.' The law enforcement official's rhetoric has been condemned and comes amid ongoing protests in LA."

IFrame Content

X user MeloDramatical wrote, "White supremacy is the greatest threat we face as a nation."

Another X user, Auntie Smartassey posted, "No one should become violent, Sheriff Wayne Ivey. Explain why the president pardons cop beaters? What validates their violence in your eyes? People who fight for human rights should face prison or death? But violence in the name of Trump is okay?"

Florida resident Kirsty Johnson posted, "This is Sherrif Wayne Ivey from my home county, his being an a------ isn't new, but openly & unapologetically saying he will brutalize and even MURDER folks is f------ sick. Pathetic, pathetic men and 'officers.'"

Democrat Kim Brideau wrote, "F--- the fascist sheriff."

Douglas E., @DouglasE4True, a self-described Antifa supporter, posted, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. How many times must the cops show themselves as white supremacist thugs/goons to be believed?"

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-guest-sheriff-mark-dannels-address-judiciary-committee

~ immigrant

Sheriff Mark Daniels uses frequent right-wing media appearances to demonize immigrants and push falsehoods about the border

01/31/23 2:29 PM EST

Fox News fearmongered about riots following footage release of Tyre Nichols’ killing. Protests were mostly peaceful.

01/31/23 11:07 AM EST

Right-wing media are using the death of Tyre Nichols to push their pro-policing agenda

01/31/23

an 1 23

Last summer, the sheriff of Coryell County in Central Texas took to an elevated platform in a small Las Vegas ballroom and made an unusual announcement: He was a “born-again sheriff,” he said, having “realized that I wasn’t doing my job 100%.”

Sheriff Scott Williams runs a 92-bed jail and provides security for the courthouse in Gatesville. He oversees around two dozen employees. The county is known for its six state prison facilities, and Williams has struggled to keep his overcrowded jail in compliance with state standards. He cannot keep his department adequately staffed because his deputies are “tired of working like Hebrew slaves for very little money,” Williams told a local news source.

In Vegas, he told the audience that he wanted to protect America from “globalists that are coming to destroy our nation,” saying “the moment we start acting like we are Americans, we are going to take our country back.”

First elected in 2016, Williams is part of the growing “constitutional sheriff” movement, which claims that sheriffs have the power to override federal and state authority on matters from border enforcement to gun control to election security.

Legal scholars say the movement has no grounding in law, yet it is gaining steam: A study last year by scholars at Texas Christian University and Tulane University on behalf of The Marshall Project found that as many as 1 in 10 of America’s 3,000-plus sheriffs believe they have the authority to stand between their constituents and higher government entities, a tactic they call “interposition.”

The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, the key organization fueling the movement, led around a dozen training sessions in Texas in 2020 and 2021. A February 2021 session in The Woodlands drew at least 27 sheriffs or deputies. At an October 2021 session in Mesquite, the keynote speaker was Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, and attendees included state Sen. Bob Hall, R-Edgewood, and former state Sen. Don Huffines, who unsuccessfully challenged Gov. Greg Abbott in the Republican primary for governor. Other attendees have included justices of the peace, police captains and members of the Texas Farm Bureau.

The seminars count for six to eight hours of continuing training credit required by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, which certifies peace officers. Last summer, the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, a nonprofit advocacy group that tracks far-right organizations, raised concerns that the agency was effectively blessing the training.

In response to that complaint plus an email from the Anti-Defamation League, TCOLE sent a field agent to attend a July 2021 training session in Houston County, which he recorded. In a one-paragraph report, the agent wrote that “the class was a study of the law and making sure law enforcement, particularly Sheriffs, were following their oath, standing up for, and protecting the individual rights of every citizen they swore to protect … some officers [said] that they had not covered this material as in depth before and thought it was a good class.”

Another agent attended a session in Burnet County in July 2021 and noted, “I heard no negative or derogatory comment made, or provided, about any segment of society.”

TCOLE’s director of government relations, Gretchen Grigsby, said in a phone interview for this story that the trainings remain under investigation by her department.

Richard Mack, a former sheriff in southeastern Arizona, founded the CSPOA and has become well known for opposing COVID-related business closures and health measures, holding absolutist views on the Second Amendment and arguing that the federal government is an unwanted intrusion into people’s lives. Most recently, the association and Mack have taken to fueling rumors about widespread voter fraud and encouraging sheriffs, in particular, to investigate complaints of voter fraud, which scholars say falls outside their authority.

Mack is a former board member of the Oath Keepers, two of whose leaders were recently convicted of seditious conspiracy for their involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Richard Mack, former sheriff of Graham County in Arizona and founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, speaks during a news conference in Las Vegas on July 12, 2022.]

At the event in Las Vegas, Williams acknowledged the controversies around Mack. He explained that he was initially reluctant to attend a training session sponsored by the CSPOA, then looked up Mack on the internet at the suggestion of a community member.

“According to the internet, Sheriff Mack is the antichrist, so don’t believe none of that crap,” he said with a chuckle, adding that Mack had converted him to the movement. Mack explained the conversion was “not to the gospel of Jesus Christ, but to the Constitution. Some people think they are one and the same, and I’m one of them."

Violent roots

The constitutional sheriff movement has its roots in the Posse Comitatus (“power of the county”) movement of the 1970s and ’80s.

Posse Comitatus founder William Potter Gale was a self-ordained minister who called on sheriffs to supersede federal agencies and serve as quasi-vigilantes, primarily to resist school desegregation.

His ideas went on to influence sovereign citizens and militia movements. Many Posse Comitatus adherents were violent; in one incident, an acolyte of Gale’s instigated a shootout that left two U.S. Marshals dead. Later, the same man was killed in another shootout, in addition to a local sheriff. Gale himself was convicted of mailing death threats to a judge and IRS agents.

Mack, who leads the modern-day sheriffs’ movement, counts as an inspiration W. Cleon Skousen, a member of the John Birch Society who proposed that the Constitution was divinely inspired and under attack from communists and liberals.

After attending a seminar by Skousen, Mack has said in various speeches and books, he was inspired to run for sheriff in his home county of Graham County, Arizona. He won in 1988 and was reelected in 1992. During his second term, Mack was one of a handful of sheriffs recruited by the National Rifle Association to challenge the gun-sale restrictions of the Brady Bill in court. When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1997 that the federal government could not require state and local governments to conduct background checks, he became a far-right hero.

After losing his bid for a third term, Mack began going around the country talking to far-right groups and moved to Fredericksburg, Texas, around 2011 to start the CSPOA. He described a far-right group geared toward recruiting law enforcement officers, although anyone is allowed to join.

A group called the Patriots of Gillespie County was instrumental in persuading Mack to move, advertising on its website that he would “bring government back to its proper role in these United States.” (In an email, Mack said he lived in Texas for 20 months “under contract” with the group. He did not agree to a phone interview.)

In 2012, he ran as an far-right, libertarian Republican primary candidate for Congress from Texas’ 21st Congressional District, which includes parts of Travis and Bexar counties. (He lost, receiving only 15% of the vote.)

Mack stepped down as the formal head of the CSPOA in November, but a CSPOA announcement in November 2022 has said he will retain a leadership role.

Mack asserts that elected sheriffs are accountable only to their voters, not judges or legislators, even when other branches of government make or interpet the law. In effect, sheriffs can nullify a law by refusing to enforce it. “The federal government, the White House, or Congress do not hire us, they cannot fire us, and they cannot tell us what to do,” he wrote in his 2009 book “The County Sheriff: America’s Last Hope.”

Mainstream legal scholars say the theory is quackery. “Mack has history wrong, and dangerously so,” says Robert Tsai, a Boston University law professor. James Madison explicitly repudiated nullification as a doctrine, Tsai said, noting that politicians used the theory to justify the expansion of slavery in the 1850s and to resist desegregation in the 1960s and 1970s.

The COVID-19 pandemic gave Mack and his movement a burst of new attention, as did the unrest in 2020 that followed the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black civilian, by a Minneapolis police officer. He argued in August 2020 that sheriffs could call upon posses to deal with protesters.

According to Mack, 27 Texas sheriffs or deputies attended a CSPOA event in February 2021 in The Woodlands. The speakers included:

Rev. Mark Collins, a former pastor in Sutherland Springs, where a gunman killed 26 churchgoers in 2017. Collins dressed as George Washington for the training.

KrisAnne Hall, an ex-prosecutor who describes herself as a constitutional lawyer and who, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “travels the country preaching that U.S. citizens do not need to comply with the government.”

Michael Peroutka, previously the Maryland leader for the League of the South, which the Southern Poverty Law Center designated as a white supremacist organization. Its new project is the Institute of the Constitution, which promotes a form of Christian nationalism.

Gary Heavin, a former women’s fitness entrepreneur from Waco who has donated to the Oath Keepers.

Pamela Elliott, a controversial former Texas sheriff who is featured on the cover of Mack’s book “Are You a David?”

Speaking early in the conference, Sheriff Randy Hargrove of Houston County, in East Texas, said that Mack had endorsed both his runs for sheriff and spoke about his struggles enforcing pandemic-related business closures and mask mandates. “I took a step back and went back to what I had been taught by Sheriff Mack … look to the Constitution first,” he said. He explained it was a learning process for him: “Thank God that we got someone like Sheriff Mack who is out there helping us with that.”

Then Mack took to the stage. “We have never and we will never advocate violence of any kind,” he said, mentioning Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. “The backdrop of this entire conference is, what is government’s role?”

“We have sheriffs who will interpose. Stand in the way. And make sure we are not victimizing our citizens all in the name of ‘it’s for your own good,’” he said.

Later, Hargrove wrote, “What this CSPOA training is, in reality, is a good old-fashioned Constitutional Revival!”

According to documents obtained through public records requests from Williams’ office, the CSPOA had a list of 50 Texas sheriffs who attended its trainings and at least 50 more it sought to recruit. Some sheriffs sent multiple employees. Williams went to one training with 12 other sworn officers from his office, which cost the office and taxpayers just under $700.

Along with sheriffs, several elected officials and county judges have attended, according to a CSPOA 2021 year-end report.

A bare-bones syllabus appears to be the only documentation submitted to TCOLE to qualify the CSPOA conferences as training, alongside a letter in which Mack claimed that the syllabus and all his information was proprietary. There are no assessments or other tests at the end of the training sessions, nor is there a textbook or manual.

After each event, sheriffs were given a “Statement of Constitutional Sheriff” to “use as a guide in all law enforcement endeavors.”

In July 2021, as part of the so-called “Texas Tour,” Mack held a training session in Burnet County, in the Hill Country, that offered six hours of TCOLE continuing education credit. Burnet County Sheriff Calvin Boyd provided an introduction, explaining that what people want from a “constitutional sheriff” is someone who “will protect you from a government that attempts to overreach.”

“And this thing’s grown,” he continued. “One of the things we need to change is that this is not radical. It’s not radical to follow the rules. It’s not radical to follow the Constitution. The other side is pretty good at turning that around.”

According to a recording provided by TCOLE, the law-enforcement-only portion of the training that counts as continuing education credit does not include legal analysis or legislative history. Mack says nullification doctrine “has nothing to do with racism,” and merely leaves it to states “to judge the constitutionality of laws and decrees.”

Interposition, he has told attendees, is like playing defense in basketball. “The bureaucrat is here trying to get to the innocent citizens and your job is to stay in the way. You make it messy for them. You make it difficult for them.”

Other sections of Mack’s training are plainly in opposition to the federal government. He told sheriffs and deputies that the IRS “is violating the constitution” when it conducts audits. “If your legislature can legislate anything in your life, they own you,” he said, saying the government makes people “slaves” through laws and excessive government spending.

Not all sheriffs who attend CSPOA training fully buy into the dogma. Sheriff Brad Norman of Ellis County, south of Dallas, said he attended a training but did not remember very much about it. He said he identifies as a “constitutional sheriff” but isn’t “part of any card-carrying organization or anything like that.”

Sheriff Trace Hendricks of Bosque County, in Central Texas, said he’s gone to three CSPOA trainings over the past two years. He was reluctant to speak about them, he said, because the media was “trying to make sheriffs look like fools.”

Hendricks said he didn’t “understand the hype” and certainly doesn’t think a sheriff can overrule federal law enforcement. While Hendricks said he identified as a “constitutional sheriff,” he added that Mack has “a couple of points that I disagree with. I didn’t go and join any cult.”

Sheriffs on the border

Experts in extremism argue that the CSPOA training events introduce fringe ideas into political discourse that gradually push the Republican Party further to the right.

“Law enforcement officers and other attendees who took part in trainings or events hosted by constitutional sheriffs have used what they see as their newfound knowledge to speak out or lobby for new policies that are often aligned with a far-right agenda, one that has been developed and promoted by constitutional sheriff’s organizations, conspiracy theorists and an anti-immigrant hate group,” said Rachel Goldwasser of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Texas, where Abbott has poured around $2 billion into Operation Lone Star, benefiting sheriffs who can militarize their departments in the name of “border security.” (Mack said in an email that the “disaster at the border” was a reason Texas sheriffs were interested in his trainings.)

[The Kinney County Courthouse in Brackettville on May 9, 2022. The county’s sheriff — on a CSPOA member list — and the county attorney planned to patrol the border by hiring private citizens as an official posse, using state funds. The plans were later dropped after some objections.

Some far-right sheriffs willingly partnered — informally at least — with border militias. In Kinney County, for example, the sheriff — who is on a CSPOA member list — and the county attorney wanted to use state funding to hire private citizens, many of whom were members of a local militia called Patriots for America, to conduct patrols of the border: an official posse. Community members and civil rights groups like the ACLU objected, so the plans were dropped. But the sheriff continued to communicate with these militia groups.

The Operation Lone Star task force is also primarily composed of sheriffs who have attended at least one of Mack’s trainings. Sheriff Raymundo Del Bosque of Zapata County has repeatedly praised Operation Lone Star, and his county has received substantial funding from the state.

“Good always prevails against evil,” he said at the July 2022 Las Vegas conference. He claimed Operation Lone Star was curbing “Biden’s open-border policies.”

“We are holding the front line together,” he said. “We need to join the fight and protect the front line.”

Four Texas sheriffs in leadership positions with the Sheriffs’ Association of Texas, which represents sheriffs all over the state, are listed as having attended at least one CSPOA training: Greg Capers of San Jacinto County, Del Bosque of Zapata County, Rand Henderson of Montgomery County and Mark Reynolds of Comal County, according to a list from the CSPOA. None returned calls for comment.

Zapata County Sheriff Raymundo Del Bosque holds his hat over his heart during the national anthem at an event held by the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association in Las Vegas, Nevada on July 12, 2022]

Part of the reason CSPOA trainings are popular in rural Texas might be linked to the role of the sheriff in Texas life. Texas has 254 counties, and many are lightly populated. Most of the sheriffs who participated in CSPOA trainings run departments with fewer than 50 employees. The Deason Center report on rural Texas sheriffs, the result of a focus group conducted by the Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center at SMU's Dedman School of Law, points out that sheriffs, unlike other law enforcement offices, are elected and maintain connections with their voters in a hands-on, personal way.

Many sheriffs cited community as a reason for joining the CSPOA. Sheriff Cutter Clinton — who joined the CSPOA before he became sheriff of Panola County — shared his experience after Mack at one Texas conference. “We’re blessed that we haven’t been troubled with a lot of the troubles that have plagued the country. … The year 2020, though, we saw things like that. Things we haven’t seen … the different executive orders, the mandates. I began to question a lot of things I believed in for a long time.” He said a friend referred him to the CSPOA.

“You got a lot of reading material,” he said, explaining that such reading helped him make sense of the role of sheriff. He praised the trainings as a chance to be “among my people.”

Williams, the sheriff of Coryell County, has said that after the CSPOA training his “relationship with the community blossomed.” All of his deputies, he says, now carry one of Skousen’s pocket constitutions.

Chasing voting fraud

In recent months, CSPOA-affiliated sheriffs have aligned with election-denier groups to form coalitions that appear ready to promote “the big lie” and pounce on any chance to highlight potential fraud in their communities. At a July event in Las Vegas, at least three Texas sheriffs appeared onstage with Mack to promote a new partnership with True the Vote, a Houston-based organization that peddles election conspiracies. (Mack claimed more Texas sheriffs were in attendance, but that could not be confirmed.)

These sheriffs have also been influential in the far-right push for more election policing, including concerns that people are voting illegally, worries about the accuracy of voting machines and the desire to appear willing and ready to investigate and arrest individuals, even members of their own county government. In rural Michigan, for example, Sheriff Dar Leaf, who works closely with Mack to steer CSPOA policies, has spent nearly two years investigating what he alleges are local election fraud claims. Despite limited resources, he has a full-time detective focused only on election investigations and has targeted local election officials, making them the target of threats of violence from radicalized community members.

Coryell County Sheriff Scott Williams (second from left) and True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht (third from right) onstage during a Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association event in Las Vegas on July 12, 2022.]

While it’s not clear that all of the Texas sheriffs who attended CSPOA trainings are election-deniers, some expressed those views in interviews. Hendricks, the Bosque County sheriff who did not agree with Mack entirely, said he believes there was election fraud: “I don’t have evidence one way or the other. I follow the news pretty closely, and I’m not comfortable with the way the outcome was.” In an interview after the press conference in Las Vegas, Williams confirmed: “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” when asked about election fraud.

In November of last year, Mack announced that he would be stepping back from the day-to-day operations of the CSPOA. He said he plans to remain active but has taken a formal position with America’s Frontline Doctors, an anti-vaccination group whose founder, Simone Gold, was sentenced to 60 days of incarceration for her role in the Capitol attack on Jan. 6. Sam Bushman, a long-time collaborator with Mack, is now the CEO of CSPOA. Bushman is best known for his daily far-right podcast “Liberty Roundtable,” which has hosted guests like Eric Trump, son of the former president; he said in November 2022, “I don’t believe that (convicted Oath Keepers founder) Stewart Rhodes was guilty.”

Shortly after Mack’s announcement, Williams appeared as a guest on “Liberty Roundtable” with Mack, who discussed the change in command at the CSPOA. Mack said that he hopes other sheriffs will get more involved with CSPOA events and trainings.

“We are just growing so quickly, and we need sitting sheriffs like Sheriff Williams to help shoulder that load,” Mack said. Williams is a member of the new CSPOA Advisory Board, alongside Leaf and other well-known far-right sheriffs.

Kirk Launius, a one-time candidate for Dallas County sheriff, is the Texas State Director for the CSPOA. He recently said that the CSPOA plans to expand its presence in Texas, using local connections and county groups like the True Texas Project as “leverage” and a way to “grease the skids.” In another recent podcast, Bushman cited the success of TCOLE certification in Texas as inspiration to expand to other states like Nevada and Utah.

Williams agreed and added, “What the CSPOA has done is taken like-minded, liberty-, God-loving sheriffs and brought us together.”

Jessica Pishko is a New America fellow working on a forthcoming book about sheriffs, to be published by Dutton.

Disclosure: Southern Poverty Law Center, Texas Christian University and Texas Farm Bureau have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2023/01/13/constitutional-sheriffs-texas/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

badish code

https://newrepublic.com/article/168567/constitutional-sheriffs-midterms-arizona

the “Constitutional Sheriffs” Movement Is Planning to Disrupt Election Day

:{A group of law enforcement officers who think their authority supersedes the federal government’s are running for elections across the country—and monitoring voters at the polls Given the numerous election deniers running right now—for the U.S. House and Senate, for governor and for secretary of state—the 2022 midterm elections’ consequences for the state of democracy are hard to overstate. But beyond the likes of Kari Lake or Doug Mastriano, who are garnering loads of national attention, there are hundreds of local officials whose races will shape the fate of future elections: county sheriffs. Just as a smaller-scale series of local acts of intimidation and violence led us to the violent attempt to overthrow the election on January 6, 2021, there’s a growing nationwide movement of self-proclaimed “constitutional sheriffs” who are preparing for their own slow-motion insurrection.

Adherents believe that county sheriffs are empowered to enforce the law in accordance with their personal interpretation of the Constitution, that their law enforcement authority supersedes that of states and the federal government. There is “no valid basis in the text or history of the U.S. Constitution” for this, as Georgetown University Law Center and the States United Democracy Center have outlined in depth. However, fueled by this political ideology, one rooted in white supremacism, these “constitutional sheriffs” and their supporters in far-right and paramilitary groups are gearing up for the first national election after the insurrection. https://revealnews.org/article/big-lie-sheriffs-target-us-elections

investigation by Jessica Pishko, published at Reveal, exposes the alliances and ties between far-right groups such as the Oath Keepers and a national network of sheriffs who have embraced election denial and have “appointed themselves election police.” Election deniers have also encouraged constitutional sheriffs to run in 2022. You can hear constitutional sheriff rhetoric in a number of incumbent candidates in states such as Washington, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts. Though constitutional sheriffs’ groups had been on the wane in recent years, Pishko reports, the pandemic and the “Stop the Steal” movement has given them new life, infusing them with new members and granting them a bigger platform with anti-vaxxers and election deniers.

more than half of Arizona’s current sheriffs, according to the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, “are at least partially aligned” with the constitutional sheriff movement. Some have also joined the election denial effort, such as Yavapai County Sheriff David Rhodes, who spoke to the Yavapai County Preparedness Team in Arizona, an organization that has some association with the Oath Keepers, as it was planning surveillance of ballot drop boxes in Arizona—“Operation Drop Box.” As the head of the Preparedness Team said at its meeting ahead of the midterms, “Everybody is worried about civil war.” Richard Mack, a former board member of the Oath Keepers and founder of the influential Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, has also visited Arizona to speak to the group. Democrats are “getting away with murder,” he told a gathering of the Preparedness Team, and “all we are asking for is that every county sheriff look at what happened in his county and make sure that we don’t fall prey.”

Elsewhere in Arizona, Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb is working with True the Vote, who were behind the debunked election-denying 2000 Mules film and who have collaborated with QAnon influencers. Lamb is “promising to act as a liaison between them and law enforcement,” as Media Matters reported. In addition to supporting “Stop the Steal” and blaming the January 6 insurrection on Hillary Clinton, among others, Lamb led a “posse” in response to Black Lives Matter protests, recruiting civilians, though his county saw no protests.

the campaign Lamb has joined, called Protect America Now, encourages sheriffs to “be ready to enforce the law and protect our constituents from any form of illegal activity,” according to documents Pishko obtained. It also offers the sheriffs “much needed grant resources to help you secure the voting procedures in your county with equipment, personnel, and increased citizen communication.” Among its recommendations are increased “patrol” at ballot drop boxes and reporting any suspicious activity to a national hotline run by True the Vote. “When other areas of government breakdown,” their letter to sheriffs says, “our local Sheriffs step in to make sure the law is enforced.”

Through such outreach, invoking election “security,” other sheriffs have enlisted in their efforts, pledging to carry out “investigations” into alleged election fraud across the United States. In Johnson County, Kansas, Sheriff Calvin Hayden failed to identify any election fraud. His investigation, The Kansas City Star reported, “hasn’t led to any charges or arrests but has helped build his profile among election deniers.” As he told supporters at an August meeting, “We’ve got to find somebody” who can say definitively that fraud is happening. At the same meeting, Hayden also told supporters, “I’m so sick and tired of hearing, ‘You’re hurting our democracy. You’re hurting our democracy.’ We don’t have a democracy. It’s a constitutional republic,” a far-right trope.

Those behind “Operation Drop Box,” the ballot box surveillance effort, stood down after they faced legal action for their desire to monitor voting locations while carrying guns. But that was just one part of the larger effort pushed by True the Vote and others, who have been coordinating to monitor ballot boxes on a much larger scale, as Pishko uncovered. As of October 27, Jen Fifield at Votebeat reported, more than 4,500 people signed up with True the Vote to monitor ballot boxes nationwide. “Their list of volunteers is growing by dozens a day,” Fifield noted, “especially since the news of voter intimidation at the sites began to spread.” That is, as the media has tracked these groups, as voters have lodged complaints, their numbers are growing.

Melissa Gira Grant @melissagira

Melissa Gira Grant is a staff writer at The New Republic and the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work.

just anec?

an 820

florda sheriff announces ban on protective face masks for deputies and visitors as COVID-19 ravages his state: ‘Not up for discussion’

not nec nsa but interesting to check:

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/how-some-alabama-county-sheriffs-force-their-inmates-into-medical-debt

no lnx

How some Alabama county sheriffs force their inmates into medical debt

Written by ProPublica December 26, 2019

This article was produced in partnership with AL.com, which is a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network.

In Alabama, the county in which you’re arrested could be the deciding factor in who will be financially responsible for your medical bills behind bars.

In Baldwin County, known for its white-sand Gulf Coast beaches and waterfront communities, the sheriff’s office ensures that inmates in the county jail do not have to pay anything more than a $15 copayment for medical care.

“Inmates are not billed for the full cost of any medical care either inside or outside” the jail, Sheriff Hoss Mack said in an email. “Alabama Code Title 14 assigns financial responsibility of inmates’ medical treatment to the department where they are being held.”

Just across the bay in Mobile County, home to one of the busiest ports in the U.S. and the eponymous city of nearly 200,000 people built around it, Sheriff Sam Cochran takes a different tack: Some of his inmates are personally on the hook for the full cost of medically necessary care they receive from outside doctors while incarcerated, even if they are awaiting trial.

The difference between the two sheriffs’ approaches demonstrates the unique power Alabama sheriffs have to set their own rules and answer only to voters.Legal experts and civil rights advocates say sheriffs like Cochran are likely violating both state law and the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment and excessive fines.

It’s not just happening in Mobile County. In multiple instances confirmed by AL.com and ProPublica, inmates have had medical bills sent to collections while they were still behind bars, damaging their credit and putting pressure on their family members to pay up to ensure the care continued.

Brandon DeLaFosse is among them. He was arrested on domestic violence, burglary and robbery charges and booked into the Mobile County Metro Jail in November 2018, three months after he underwent surgery on his inner ear. Since then, he has received bills totaling thousands of dollars for necessary follow-up appointments and tests, some of which have gone to collections while he remains behind bars.

“He keeps getting bills in the mail,” said Alicia DeLaFosse, Brandon’s mother, who has paid hundreds of dollars for care he has received while in custody. “It’s all money he owes from going back and forth to the doctor.”

Like many inmates, DeLaFosse doesn’t have significant income or access to public or private insurance in jail.

Alabama law is clear: If an “inmate develops a medical condition which requires immediate treatment at a medical-care facility outside the county jail, the department shall be financially responsible for the cost of the treatment of the inmate.”

But Cochran said when the jail’s doctors determine inmates need care that goes beyond what in-house medical staff and contracted outpatient providers can handle, they are often taken to private medical professionals who do not have contracts with the jail. And he allows those medical providers to bill at least some of those inmates directly....

new 619

How 8 Alabama sheriffs who lost reelection purposely made life harder for their successors

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/the-renegade-sheriffs

on a Friday afternoon in March, 2013, a sheriff’s sergeant named Jody Hoagland noticed a red Nissan pickup truck drifting off a road. Hoagland was two hours into his shift patrolling Liberty County, Florida, eight hundred square miles of the state’s Panhandle. He had just come from a small shed fire, and was driving through the Apalachicola National Forest, which carpets the southern half of the county in longleaf pines. Two-lane roads meander past grazing cows, Baptist churches (“Good News: Jesus Loves You”), Confederate flags, and roadside stands peddling stink bait. Signs of humankind vanish, save for the solitary roadside mailbox. You live here because you want to be left alone.

Hoagland signalled the truck to pull over. A scruffy bearded man was driving and a blond woman was in the passenger seat. A silver .357 revolver lay between them. Two Chihuahuas barked excitedly. Hoagland asked the man, whose name was Floyd Parrish, to get out of the truck, and noticed a bulge in his right jeans pocket—a Titan .25-calibre handgun, it turned out, with one round in the chamber and the safety off. Parrish didn’t have a permit to carry a concealed weapon. It was easy to get one—all you had to do was take a class and pay a fee. Hoagland arrested Parrish and drove him to the county jail. Not long afterward, the sheriff, Nick Finch, called.

Finch had been Liberty’s sheriff for less than three months. He first decided to run for the job during a garage sale, after a customer locked her keys in her car and Finch called the sheriff’s office for help. There was only one deputy on the road, he was told, and the deputy was tied up in a funeral procession. Finch, who was raised on a farm in Iowa, had spent close to two decades in the Army and in the Air Force Reserve, so he was fluent in the language of God and country. White-haired and blue-eyed, with a meaty build, he was appealing to voters, and was helped by the fact that his wife’s family had lived in the area for generations.

Liberty County, with eighty-seven hundred residents, is the state’s second least populous. It is whiter, poorer, and less well educated than Florida as a whole. Timber has long been the chief industry, though the federal government has slowed logging in recent decades to protect the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker. One local told me, “The saying goes, ‘In Liberty County, if you run out of toilet tissue try a woodpecker.’ ” A number of side roads bear the names of residents; when I visited recently, I drove down Jimmy Lee Drive and ran into the actual Jimmy Lee. The closest thing to a community history, “The Heritage of Liberty County, Florida,” has entries on the region’s tupelo honey; homecoming queens; and worm grunting, or coaxing worms out of the earth with a wooden stake and a metal strip. Several pages are devoted to a theory that the Apalachicola River’s east bank was the original Garden of Eden.

Liberty’s sheriff and his dozen or so deputies are the only law-enforcement agents in the county. As in much of rural America, the sheriff is far more than an administrator. He’s an aspirational figure and a moral touchstone. Eddie Joe White, the current sheriff, told me, “There’s no way to define the parameters of sheriff. From one day to the next, you’re a fireman, you’re a paramedic, you’re a grief counsellor. You can’t back away from any responsibility and say it’s not your job, because, as sheriff, you are responsible for everything as it deals with humanity.”

Finch won the election on his second try, in 2012, just after his fiftieth birthday. Before taking office, he went online to research his new position. Finch is conservative, and the sites he visited argued that the sheriff, in his county, is more powerful than the President. That argument was consistent with the beliefs of Finch’s law-enforcement hero, Joe Arpaio, the former Arizona sheriff who last year was convicted of defying a court order to stop the racial profiling of Latinos. “I like Joe, because Joe’s a lot like me,” Finch told me. “He doesn’t take shit from nobody. He knows what his role is, and come hell or high water, he was going to do what he thought was right.” On Facebook, Finch posted a Breitbart story, about a sheriff named Denny Peyman, headlined “Kentucky Sheriff to Obama: No Gun Control in My County.”

There are roughly three thousand sheriffs in America, in forty-seven states. Arpaio and Peyman are among the dozens aligned with the “constitutional sheriffs” movement. Another is David A. Clarke, Jr., the cowboy-hatted Wisconsin firebrand who considered joining the Department of Homeland Security. (He now works at America First Action, a pro-Trump political-action committee.) There are even more followers of constitutional policing across America among law enforcement’s rank and file. One group, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, or C.S.P.O.A., claims about five thousand members.

C.S.P.O.A. members believe that the sheriff has the final say on a law’s constitutionality in his county. Every law-enforcement officer has some leeway in choosing which laws to enforce, which is why it’s rare to get a ticket for jaywalking, for example. But, under this philosophy, the supremacy clause of the Constitution, which dictates that federal law takes precedence over state law, is irrelevant. So is the Supreme Court. “They get up every morning and put their clothes on the same way you and I do,” Finch told me. “Why do those nine people get to decide what the rest of the country’s going to be like?” To the most dogmatic, there’s only one way to interpret the country’s founding documents: pro-gun, anti-immigrant, anti-regulation, anti-Washington

Finch was on the way to Dirty Dick’s Crab House with his wife when he started getting calls about the arrest. (If you are a rural sheriff, everyone has your cell-phone number.) After speaking with Hoagland, he drove to the county jail, where Parrish, a former logger, told his version of the arrest. He and his partner, Sherry Chumney, lived in a wooden house on forty acres of land, a half mile down a dirt road, past a barricade of tangled brush and two “No Trespassing” signs. Parrish carried the .357 revolver in case he came across an unfriendly panther or bear. He carried his small gun because he had a chronic lung disease; if he felt woozy, he fired it, and Chumney rushed over with his inhaler. That afternoon, Parrish said, he had driven to his brother’s place and forgotten that the small gun was in his pocket.

Finch listened to the story, and then told him, “Fortunately for you, young man, I’m a believer in the Second Amendment.” He let Parrish go, a practice that people in Liberty call getting “unarrested.”

Since its inception, in ninth-century England—when the sheriff was called the shire reeve, or county guardian—the office has been a kind of one-man government. The first sheriffs were appointed by the king, and charged with collecting taxes, investigating deaths, and commanding the posse comitatus, a gang of locals dispatched to hunt fugitives. (In Latin, the term means “the force of the county.”) The British brought the idea with them to America, where the office took on the characteristics of its new home. In 1652, when Virginia’s royal governor told each county to choose a sheriff, Northampton County let its voters decide.

Nearly every American county still has an elected sheriff. Over time, cities established police forces, which diminished the office’s power in the densely populated Northeast. (In 2000, Connecticut eliminated the post entirely.) But in the South and in the West, where many counties are far larger than in Eastern states, the sheriff ties together isolated communities. He is Andy Taylor, from “The Andy Griffith Show,” and Little Bill Daggett, from “Unforgiven.” Southerners call him the “high sheriff.” Almost every American sheriff is a white man. He’s more likely to come from the place he serves than a police chief is, and his deputies are intimately involved in everyday life. Casey LaFrance, an associate professor at Western Illinois University who studies law enforcement, told me, “The sheriff’s the one that’s going to tell me I’m getting divorced if I don’t know it, or tell me I have eight days to leave my house.”

In most states, including Florida, the sheriff’s office is written into the state constitution. Once a sheriff is elected, he can usually be removed only by a governor or by the voters. His average tenure is twenty-four years. “Once you become the sheriff, you’re likely to remain the sheriff until you retire or die,” LaFrance said. This gives sheriffs wide latitude to shape how the law is enforced. According to research by the political scientists Mirya Holman and Emily Farris, sheriffs who believe myths about abused women—for instance, that they can easily leave their abusers—are less likely to demand the mandatory arrest of domestic-violence suspects. Similarly, sheriffs critical of immigrants are more likely to order deputies to check a driver’s immigration status during a routine traffic stop. Holman, an associate professor at Tulane University, said that many sheriffs believe, “I’m this independent man that has control over this, and no one can tell me what to do.”

In the formation of this Constitutional Republic, the county was—and remains the seat of power for the People. The county Sheriff is the only legal law enforcement officer in the united states of america! The Sheriff can mobilize all men between the ages of 18 and 45 who are in good health and not inthe Federal military service. Others can volunteer, women included. This body of citizens is the sheriff’s posse. All of them serve when called by the Sheriff. The title of this body is posse comitatus.The idea of a constitutional sheriff emerged in the nineteen-seventies, in California. It was first proposed by William Potter Gale, who had been an aide to General Douglas MacArthur. According to Daniel Levitas’s book, “The Terrorist Next Door,” Gale embraced a belief system called Christian Identity, and, as a self-styled minister, preached that the Constitution was a divinely inspired document intended to elevate whites above Jews and racial minorities. From his Ministry of Christ Church, outside Yosemite National Park, where he sermonized in front of a giant Confederate flag, Gale produced a newsletter, “identity,” its name reflecting his ideology and his fondness for unnecessary capitalization. In 1971, he mailed Vol. 6, No. 1, to his flock. Its featured story, written by Gale, appeared under the byline of Colonel Ben Cameron, a character in the film “The Birth of a Nation” who helps found the Ku Klux Klan. Gale railed against civil-rights laws, the income tax, the United Nations, and the showering of tax dollars on foreign allies. He believed that a conservative posse comitatus offered a solution:

Gale was writing not long after Bull Connor, the public-safety commissioner in Birmingham, Alabama, had turned dogs and fire hoses on nonviolent protesters. His innovation was to wrap his rants in constitutionalism and legalese, a tactic intended to make them sound legitimate. Michael Barkun, who has written extensively about the radical right, told me that Gale’s message was, “We know what the law really means. It’s all those lawyers who have erected a kind of apparatus of deception.”

By the early nineteen-eighties, Gale’s dogma, in the form of the Posse Comitatus movement, had taken hold in the Midwestern farm belt, which was reeling from a foreclosure crisis. A sympathizer who ran Cattle Country Broadcasting, in Dodge City, Kansas, played Gale’s screeds nightly. “The law is that your citizens—a posse—will hang an official who violated the law and the Constitution,” Gale said in the summer of 1982. “Take him to the most populated intersection of the township and at noon hang him by the neck.” Posses had formed in nearly half the country. Some convened their own “common law” grand juries and “indicted” officials for ostensibly failing to uphold their oaths of office. A few turned violent. Posse members assaulted an I.R.S. agent in Wisconsin, tried to “arrest” a cop in Idaho, and nearly provoked a shoot-out in a California tomato field.

The movement’s violent side was eventually its downfall. In 1983, authorities in North Dakota tried to arrest a Posse acolyte named Gordon Kahl, a mechanic who had violated probation in a tax-evasion case, and two U.S. marshals died in the ensuing standoff. Kahl went into hiding for four months, and then was killed in a second gun battle, in Arkansas, along with a local sheriff. Although some Posse members rebranded themselves Christian Patriots, it was too late. A few years later, Gale was convicted of mailing death threats to a judge and to I.R.S. agents. When he died, in 1988, the movement was fading from prominence. His vision of sheriff supremacy, however, persisted.

After Sheriff Finch released Floyd Parrish, Sergeant Hoagland couldn’t let the incident go. “The more I just sat there and stewed on it, steamed on it, it just ate away at me,” Hoagland told me. He had no problem with guns; he hunted gators, deer, turkeys, and squirrels. But he suspected that Finch was doing a political favor. Hoagland wasn’t the only deputy suspicious of Finch. The sheriff’s experience was mostly in the military and in state agencies, not in small-town policing. When I met Mark Mallory, a former lieutenant at the office, he handed me paperwork from four incidents that he believed Finch had mishandled. Other former deputies recalled a botched attempted arrest in which Finch told the man detained, “I’m fucking God in this county.” (Finch told me that he didn’t remember the incident, and added, “I’m a Christian, and I would never compare myself to God.”)

Hoagland started looking for another job, and two months after the Parrish incident a nearby fire department offered him full-time work. On his last day at the sheriff’s office, Hoagland called an inspector at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, a state agency that investigates misconduct by public officials. Three days later, he travelled to F.D.L.E. headquarters, in Tallahassee, for a taped interview. He told inspectors that he had kept a copy of the paperwork from Parrish’s arrest but that when Tim Partridge, another deputy, went to retrieve the jail copy it was missing. Partridge also checked the logbook for Parrish’s name, and found that someone had whited it out.

Eleven days later, a friend tipped Finch off that his arrest was imminent. Finch, who was at the sheriff’s office, went home and changed into a blue shirt and jeans so that reporters couldn’t take an arrest photo of him in uniform. When he got back to the office, F.D.L.E. officials were waiting for him. An inspector read him Executive Order 13-140, in which Rick Scott, the Republican governor, suspended him from office. “I thought, This is crazy. I haven’t done anything wrong,” Finch told me. The headline in the Calhoun-Liberty Journal read “Sheriff Arrested for Official Misconduct.” In the next issue, the paper listed him in the police blotter alongside men arrested on suspicion of domestic battery and armed robbery.

Shortly after the arrest, Finch got a phone call from Richard Mack, who had followed news of the arrest from his Arizona home. Mack said that he was the founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. In Finch, he saw a fellow-patriot, and he wanted to help.

One day last fall, Mack bounded to the front of a school lecture hall in suburban Phoenix. At sixty-four, he has dark hair and a grandfatherly charm. The night before, I’d met him at a mall where, for exercise, he likes to ascend the descending escalators. This morning, he was proselytizing to about three dozen people at his group’s Oath of Office Training, one of several workshops that it puts on across the country each year.

The workshop was held in a white room draped with six American flags and a canary-yellow Gadsden flag, reading “DON’T TREAD ON ME,” which was a mainstay of Trump and Tea Party rallies. “We have a moral responsibility to obey just laws, and we have a moral responsibility not to obey unjust laws,” Mack told the audience of mostly older white men, echoing Martin Luther King, Jr. “Who decides? The person who takes the oath decides.” There were murmurs of approval.

The crowd was a cross-section of today’s anti-government right: a retired male cop fed up with “Antifa nonsense,” a retired female cop concerned about “the jihadi threat,” an elderly couple afraid of “the conspiracy to put us into world governance.” Another man told me that the world is controlled by the Vatican, the District of Columbia, and the Queen of England, then handed me seven stapled pieces of paper and promised, “It’s gonna make your eyes fall out of your head.” It was an indictment issued by a common-law grand jury, one of William Potter Gale’s innovations.

In the eighties and nineties, Mack served two terms as the sheriff of Graham County, Arizona. One of his influences was the Salt Lake City police chief and author W. Cleon Skousen, who believed that the Founders were God’s disciples and the Constitution a Christian document. As a young officer, Mack had attended one of Skousen’s workshops. “That man spoke with the power of angels,” he told me.

...In 1994, Mack and a Montana sheriff named Jay Printz sued the federal government over a provision of the Brady Bill, a gun-control measure that would have temporarily required sheriffs to run background checks on gun buyers. As the case worked its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, Mack became a hero of the burgeoning militia movement, a collection of anti-government paramilitary groups that descended from Posse ideology. His status was bolstered after the Court ruled in the sheriffs’ favor, in Printz v. United States, in 1997. Each person at the Arizona workshop received a booklet dissecting the case, which, on the cover, had been renamed “Mack/Printz v. USA.”

As the decade wore on, the militia movement lost momentum, and Mack’s speaking gigs dried up. He worked as the public-relations director of Gun Owners of America, the N.R.A.’s more strident cousin. He also sold cars, ran for the U.S. Senate as a Libertarian, and was a contestant on the sole season of the Showtime reality series “American Candidate.” Disgruntlement with the Presidency of Barack Obama, and the dismal economy of the late aughts, helped revive anti-government fervor, and, along with it, Mack’s influence. In 2009, he self-published “The County Sheriff: America’s Last Hope,” a fifty-page manifesto with a sheriff’s star on the front and an endorsement from Arpaio on the back. “There is a man who can stop the abuse, end the tyranny, and restore the Constitution, once again, as the supreme law of the land,” he writes. “Yes, it is you sheriff!” Mack said that he sold a hundred thousand copies of the book.

By this time, sheriff supremacy had cross-pollinated with other kinds of right-wing thought, resulting, for example, in the county-supremacy movement, in which dozens of counties adopted ordinances claiming control over federal land. Each repackaging of the idea helped to slightly shift the broader public’s perception of what constitutes normal governance. This is how fringe ideas work. In a recent study published in the journal Political Behavior, participants were given a list of ways to address a divisive policy issue, such as immigration. Participants whose lists included either radically conservative positions (ban immigrants entirely) or radically liberal positions (accept all immigrants) were more likely to recalibrate their view of what the centrist stance was. Matthew N. Lyons, the author of the upcoming book “Insurgent Supremacists,” told me that this is how the extreme right wields power without holding office. “Their notion of political change is based on shifting the parameters of the political culture as a precondition for transforming institutions,” he said.

When Mack launched the C.S.P.O.A., around 2010, he described it as “the army to set our nation free.” He recruited supporters, in part, by playing to sheriffs’ Second Amendment ardor. (In Holman and Farris’s survey of sheriffs, ninety-five per cent said that defending gun rights was more important than restricting access to firearms.) After the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, and the subsequent push in Washington for gun control, Mack published a list that eventually included almost five hundred sheriffs who, in his words, “have vowed to uphold and defend the Constitution against Obama’s unconstitutional gun control measures.” (Several sheriffs later said that Mack had added them without their knowledge.) One Tennessee sheriff told the Southern Poverty Law Center, “If you come in here trying to take up the guns, it’s not going to be a nice day for somebody.”

Mack told me that he has spoken at more than a hundred and twenty-five rallies. Many supporters were also Skousenites, because the conservative commentator Glenn Beck routinely touted Skousen’s books. At C.S.P.O.A. workshops, everyone gets a Mad Libs-style workbook based on Skousen’s “The Making of America.” Speakers emphasize the Second Amendment, the Fourth (searches and seizures), and the Tenth (states’ rights). They portray officers as arbiters of morality and justice.

Mack personally disavows discrimination and infuses his lectures with the language of the civil-rights era. He likes to say, “We should have never heard of Rosa Parks,” explaining that a constitutional sheriff wouldn’t have arrested her. Yet, according to his ideology, a sheriff could, for example, reject the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship and rights to former slaves. (Mack described such a scenario as a “hypothetical,” and said, “I don’t do hypotheticals. I deal with what’s real.”) A speaker at one C.S.P.O.A. event I attended, an attorney, encouraged us to memorize the chorus of a song he’d written:

No matter what they told you all

Courts and judges cannot make law

The case law method has a fatal flaw

Because courts cannot make law.

Mack brought Finch’s case to the attention of the conservative media. Within days of Finch’s arrest, the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was floating the notion on his Web site, Infowars, that the case was an example of political persecution. An Infowars contributor said that Finch had won office as a nonpartisan candidate, “which to me is probably why you had a Republican governor sic his minions on this constitutional-following sheriff, because he owes his allegiance to no one.” Soon Mack called into the Infowars talk show and raised the possibility that Finch’s suspension was the result of an attempted coup. “That’s very common, to have enemies within,” he said.

Amid the flurry of coverage, a radio host named Burnie Thompson invited Finch on his afternoon show, on Talk Radio 101. Thompson prided himself on his independent thinking. “I’m not one of these—what do they call them?—whatever, these fringe groups,” Thompson told me. “I’m a pretty mainstream guy. I’m an Air Force captain. I got a master’s in journalism.” Still, he was impressed by Finch’s certainty that he’d done nothing wrong. After the interview, he read Mack’s book about constitutional sheriffs and became a convert. During the next few months, he interviewed Finch around a dozen times, helped him raise money for his defense, and asked a listener to record a song about the case to the tune of Bob Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff,” replacing “shot” with “saved.”

Thompson told me that, in a bid to get Finch’s case thrown out, he had met with Governor Scott and his general counsel, Peter Antonacci. Thompson shared a theory with them, gleaned in part from Mack’s book, that a sheriff can do whatever he wants in his own jail. Antonacci repeatedly told him that there was no legal precedent for this theory. “I’m thinking, His chief counsel believes that?” Thompson said. “You know that feeling when you go, ‘Oh, my God, the world’s not what I thought it was’?” (Neither Antonacci nor Scott’s office responded to multiple requests for comment.)

In addition to official misconduct, a third-degree felony, Finch was charged with falsifying public records, a misdemeanor. Jack Campbell, the prosecutor in the case, told me, “To me, it was always a public-records case. If you want to stop enforcing a law, O.K., I guess you can. You can fire all your deputies and just sit over there in your office all day, if that’s what you want to do.” He continued, “But you’re the sheriff: you can’t hide and not tell people what you’re doing.”

Finch’s trial started just before Halloween. By then, his Facebook page had more likes than there are residents in Liberty County, and his defense fund had raised almost fifteen thousand dollars. “Somebody even sent me money from Australia,” Finch told me. There had been three rallies in three towns, the last in front of the Liberty County courthouse. More than a hundred people, some in American-flag shirts or scarves, strung up a Gadsden flag, set out lawn chairs and coolers, and waved signs: “When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty”; “Protect our Constitution”; “Nick Finch, the people’s sheriff.” One woman had strung a container of Bic Cover-it correction fluid around her neck, a nod to how Floyd Parrish’s name had vanished from the jail records.

On the day Finch testified, the mood in the Liberty courthouse was as electric as the opening night of a play. Mack had flown in from Arizona. Reporters came from Tallahassee. Finch wore a dark jacket, a blue dotted tie, and beige slacks. On his right lapel was a tiny American-flag pin.

“Sheriff Finch,” Campbell said, “do you think you’re above the law?”

“No, sir.”

“Do you think your judgment trumps everybody else’s in the court system?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Do you believe that you had the authority as a constitutional sheriff to do away with this case, on your own authority?” Campbell asked.

“Absolutely,” Finch replied.

The case against Finch was mostly circumstantial. The jailer who’d been on duty that night testified that the sheriff walked out of the building with Parrish’s file. “Now, whether it’s under his bed at the house, or it’s out in the woods, or it’s in the shredder in a burn pit, it doesn’t make a hell of a difference. It’s not where it belongs,” Campbell told the jury. No one admitted to whiting out Parrish’s name in the jail records, though investigators had a lab analyze the splotches, which proved that someone had. “The fact is,” Campbell argued, “that the sheriff told this jury that he believes that his discretion allows him to decide which laws he’s going to follow and which laws he’s not. Ladies and gentlemen, if he’s going to break the law concerning carry-and-conceal firearms, how are we to believe that he won’t break the one for perjury in this trial?”

The jury deliberated for about an hour, and found Finch not guilty on both counts. Finch hugged everyone within reach, made a few remarks to the TV scrum outside the courthouse, and then called Alex Jones, who told his audience, “He needs to be the next governor—I’m telling you right now—of Florida. It’s these type of men that stand up for the Constitution that are going to save this country.”

Finch, reinstated, sued the county for attorneys’ fees and won about a hundred and sixty thousand dollars. The rest of his term was less triumphant. He fought with county commissioners over his budget. Three female employees sued him—two alleging gender discrimination in the department and one that he had sexually harassed her. Finch settled with all three. Trump’s emergence as a Presidential front-runner was a rare bright spot for Finch, who said he was among the first sheriffs in Florida to endorse him. Finch got to meet the future President at a rally in Tampa. “You know what?” he told me. “I look at Trump and I see myself. Because this guy is getting the shit beat out of him from Day One.”

Finch ran for reëlection in 2016. His chief opponent was Eddie Joe White, who was related to three previous Liberty County sheriffs, including one who was shot and killed in the line of duty in 1919. White chose a pointed campaign slogan: “It’s time we restore the trust.” Finch’s ads touted him as “Your Constitutional Sheriff,” but he and his wife, the Liberty County native, had divorced, and he knew this would count against him. Late one night about a month and a half before the election, Floyd Parrish and an acquaintance got into an argument. According to Parrish, the man, drunk and threatening, lunged at him, and he had no choice but to shoot. The man died. A deputy called Finch in the middle of the night to relay the news. Finch told me he thought, “Jesus. I’m done. There’s the election.” He lost the sheriff’s race, earning only six per cent of the vote.

For the constitutional-sheriffs movement, however, Finch’s defeat didn’t matter. The C.S.P.O.A. named him Sheriff of the Year in 2014, and Mack mentioned the trial in his book “Are You a David?” (The government is Goliath.) The movement’s ideas have now spread far beyond a few renegade sheriffs. In Nevada, for example, members of the Bundy family have emerged as leaders of a movement to wrest control of public lands from Washington. During an armed standoff on the ranch of the family patriarch, Cliven Bundy, which drew anti-government crowds from around the country, including several constitutional sheriffs, Bundy demanded that his local sheriff disarm federal authorities. The sheriff refused. Earlier this year, after charges against Bundy related to the standoff were dismissed, Bundy said to a TV reporter, “I think we’re going to protest the county sheriff: ‘Why didn’t you do your job?’ ”

In 2015, a Nevada lawmaker introduced a bill to give sheriffs veto power over some federal law-enforcement activities. Last year, in Washington, D.C., Jason Chaffetz, at that time a U.S. representative from Utah, introduced a bill that would, in practice, transfer law-enforcement responsibilities to sheriffs on certain public lands. Soon after Trump took office, he met with representatives of the National Sheriffs’ Association, including a sheriff from Pennsylvania who had served on C.S.P.O.A.’s advisory council, and one from North Carolina who had ties to the group. That summer, Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio, who is now running for the U.S. Senate in Arizona. A few years back, when Mack visited D.C. to decry the Obama Administration’s immigration measures, only three lawmakers met with him. One was Jeff Sessions, now the Attorney General. Ryan Lenz, a senior investigative reporter at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told me that “the migration of these ideas to the mainstream primed the election for Trump.” Trump’s election, in turn, “finalized the migration.”

I met Finch one night in December at a McDonald’s in Blountstown, Florida. We sat at a table near the window, the restaurant wreathed for the holiday. Finch was working as a long-haul trucker and had just finished a trip to South Carolina. He wore a Harley-Davidson T-shirt and a “Thin Blue Line” baseball cap; its insignia, an American flag with a single blue stripe, honors police. He recounted his time as sheriff, and when he got to the trial he stopped and shook his head. Occasionally, he strayed into national politics, asking, “How in the hell does Hillary Clinton get to lie, cheat, steal, and probably kill, and nobody cares?” As we talked, a former deputy stopped at our table and said, “What’s going on, Sheriff?” Finch responded with a pained smile.

Finch remains a powerful symbol for constitutional sheriffs. The day after Trump’s Inauguration, under a gray, drizzling sky, I drove to an Embassy Suites near the Baltimore airport for a C.S.P.O.A. training workshop. While I waited at a table in the lobby for my packet—and my black-and-gold lanyard that said I was part of the “posse”—a group of pink pussy-hatted women passed by, on their way to the Women’s March in Washington. In a conference room, the C.S.P.O.A. audience flipped through their “Making of America” booklets. Mack wasn’t there, but, via a video monitor, he introduced Finch as a sheriff whose “strong stand for freedom” had cost him his badge. Finch stood up, put his hand over his heart, and led the room in the Pledge of Allegiance. ?

Reporting for this piece was supported by a grant from the Reporting Award at N.Y.U.’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

This article appears in the print edition of the April 30, 2018, issue, with the headline “Lone Stars.”

stub

Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) is a political organization of local police officials in the United States who believe in an interpretation of the United States Constitution wherein federal and state government authorities are subordinate to local government authority. In this regard, the CSPOA is an outgrowth of the Patriot movement and has some ideological similarities with the Sovereign Citizen Movement, although they are by no means identical.[1] An article by the Intelligence Report of the Southern Poverty Law Center states that "... the real root of the 'county supremacy' movement that has been explicitly embraced by the CSPOA is the Posse Comitatus, a racist and anti-Semitic group of the 1970s and 1980s that also defined the county sheriff as the highest 'legitimate' law enforcement authority in the country. . . ." and continues to identify several county sheriffs who are in sympathy with the stated goals of the CSPOA.[2]

References

^ Rothschild, Mike - What this Sheriff said on Twitter is part of a dangerous trend, Attn.com (Oct. 15, 2016).

^ Potok, Mark and Lenz, Ryan, Line in the Sand, Intelligence Report of the Southern Poverty Law Center (Jun. 13, 2016).

External links

Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association

"The Renegade Sheriffs

https://www.splcenter.org/news/2016/08/03/intelligence-report-constitutional-sheriffs-movement-spreads-promotes-defiance-federal-laws

august 03, 2016

A movement made up of sheriffs claiming to be the highest law enforcement authority in the country is growing nationwide as it exploits hot-button issues such as gun control to encourage sheriffs to defy federal laws they don’t like, according to the Summer 2016 issue of the SPLC’s Intelligence Report, released today.

The cover story, “Line in the Sand,” details the growth of this radical ideology since 2009. The movement, formed around an organization called the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), is a phenomenon rarely, if ever, seen in the United States – a concerted, long-term effort to recruit law enforcement officers into the antigovernment “Patriot” movement.

The Intelligence Report interviewed dozens of sheriffs who appeared on a list, compiled by the CSPOA, of almost 500 sheriffs who purportedly had “vowed to uphold and defend the Constitution against Obama’s unconstitutional gun measures.” Overall, it appears the movement is successfully exploiting concerns about gun, environmental and land-use regulations to bring law enforcement officers into the fold.“The phenomenon of the ‘constitutional sheriffs’ movement is deeply troubling and problematic,” said Mark Potok, senior fellow at the SPLC and editor of the Intelligence Report. “These men and women are being told by extremist leaders that they have the right to decide what laws they want to enforce and can keep federal law enforcement agents out of their counties. That is utterly untrue, the very opposite of constitutional, and it in fact encourages sheriffs and their deputies to defy the law of the land.”

The report notes that the organizing of these sheriffs is occurring against the backdrop of the larger militia movement and the occupation at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon early this year by antigovernment extremists.

The threat of the antigovernment “Patriot” movement is also examined in a training DVD included in the law enforcement edition of this issue of the Intelligence Report. The video, a short film designed to be shown at roll call, focuses on the rising threat of antigovernment extremists, especially in the wake of the occupation in Oregon and a related 2014 armed standoff with law enforcement officials in Nevada.

Also in this issue of the Intelligence Report:

“White Lives Matter” is a look at a counter-movement to Black Lives Matter that has been built by radical-right activists. The project, which has become increasingly popular among neo-Nazis and other white supremacists, appears to be largely the work of a 40-year-old woman in Tennessee.

“Hate in the Race” is a month-by-month examination of the political vitriol and extremism that has characterized the presidential race since last summer – a deluge of extremist rhetoric coming primarily from Donald Trump.

“670 Days” reflects on the nearly two years between Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s first armed standoff with the federal government and his arrest in February – a period that saw the antigovernment movement grow by leaps and bounds, in part because of Bundy’s apparent imperviousness to arrest.

...Sex Offenders with Guns and Badges

There already exist, in America today, precedents for such a vision. One is in Maricopa County, Arizona, where County Sheriff Joe Arpaio commands a semi-private army of thousands of deputized volunteers that constitute his “posse”.

In 2012 a local CBS affiiate’s investigation showed that some of Arpaio’s deputees – who “wear uniforms, have badges, drive county vehicles” and even carry guns – also had criminal records that included,

“arrests for assault, drug possession, domestic violence, sex crimes against children, disorderly conduct, impersonating an officer – and the list goes on.”

Another example, from May 2016, is equally menacing. “Latinos and Democrats hide in safe houses as right-wing sheriff uses mob rule to take over Texas town“, read the title of one liberal media account of alleged political repression under the County Sheriff of Edwards County, Texas – a sheriff who belongs to the Christian right, anti-federal sheriffs group the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA).

One leader associated with CSPOA is Larry Pratt, founder and head of Gun Owners of America (GOA). Before founding CSPOA, former County Sheriff Richard Mack served as a lobbyist for Pratt’s organization.

Pratt was profiled in a July 14, 2014 story in Rolling Stone magazine, by journalist Alexander Zaitchik, that noted Pratt’s enthusiasm for the early 1980s efforts of Guatemala’s “Civil Defense Patrols”. Describes Zaitchik,

“It was during his involvement in Central American policy and supporting counterinsurgencies around the world that Pratt made multiple trips to Guatemala to observe rural “Civil Defense Patrols.” Contemporary human rights observers (and two subsequent Truth Commissions) consider them “death squads” for their role in killing and torturing civilians. But Pratt found much to admire. He combined observations from these visits with similarly impressed notes on the Civilian Home Defense Forces, vigilante patrols in Ferdinand Marcos’ Philippines, for a slim book published by the Gun Owners Foundation in 1990, Armed People Victorious. In it, he praises the leadership of Efrain Rios Montt, the country’s military leader during 1982 and 1983 who greatly expanded the civil defense patrols. Twenty years later, Guatemalan judges would find Montt guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity. One Amnesty International Report from Montt’s tenure detailed massacres in 60 Indian villages over a three-month period, leaving more than 2,500 dead. As late as 2001, Pratt was publically praising Montt as a “powerful Christian leader.”

In his final chapter of Armed People Victorious, Pratt enthused,

“The War on Drugs can be won the same way the guerilla insurgencies were pushed back in Guatemala and the Philippines… The history of the United States for years before and after the founding of the Republic was the history of an armed people with functioning militias involved in civil defense… While the United States has forgotten its successes in this area, other countries have rediscovered them. It is time that the United States return to reliance on an armed people. There is no acceptable alternative.”

Pratt’s vision is mirrored in William Lind’s 2014 novel Victoria, in which crime is vanquished when the triumphant white militia groups institute the summary execution of accused criminals. Lind specifically notes that those executed criminals are black.

In a series of columns he wrote in 2005 following a “symposium on modern war” William Lind attended during which participants sought to answer the question, “what might a state armed service designed for 4GW look like”, Lind expanded on the government-backed militia idea that he and Weyrich would later embed in The Next Conservatism:

The militias, perhaps under guidance of county sheriffs, would be government financed and report to national government at some level. Attendees considered Congress, rather than the chief executive, to be the best form of oversight – because an unscrupulous president might abuse such power. Explained Lind, in an August 24, 2005 column (one of 50 Lind columns in this PDF file),

“the militia we are talking about is a public, not a private militia. It is funded by government, and it reports to government (it is adcon to Congress and, unless mobilized, opcon to the county sheriff). Our working group thought it was important to keep the militia away from the federal executive branch as much as possible, because the executive branch will try either to destroy it or to turn it into a tool for Big Brother. But this militia is not just a bunch of guys running around in the woods. It is a state armed service, just like the four we now have — the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps and the Coast Guard.”

In March 2016, Donald Trump’s son Donald Trump, Jr. made direct contact with one of the leaders of CSPOA, a national organization of potentially renegade U.S. county sheriffs pledged to disregard and even oppose federal laws and authority they deem unconstitutional — which has ties both to militia groups across the nation, other far-right anti-federal national groups such as the Oath Keepers, racist political parties, Southern white nationalist groups, and radical gun owners groups.

Trump the 4GW Street Fighter

While Trump’s various positions track those in Lind’s book with considerable precision, his campaign tactics evoke William Lind’s 4GW, Fourth Generation warfare, tactics as well.

In 2015, Donald Trump entered the Republican primary race as an insurgent, with negligible support from the Republican Party. Elite pundits were nearly unanimous – Trump’s presidential bid was a national joke. One year later no one was laughing.

He gained extensive Internet exposure via big far right Internet venues such as the Drudge Report, and mainstream media dominance by ceaselessly attacking “political correctness” and violating established or unwritten norms of expected presidential behaviors. That, in turn served both to grow Trump’s populist support base and make him ubiquitous on the big TV networks in a way no other candidate was able to match.

And, he engaged in asymmetrical combat by going after his opponent’s weaknesses — and in a wholly unexpected manner that radically violated established Republican etiquette and convention.

The Next Conservatism takes it for granted that big money has almost irreparably corrupted both the Republican and Democratic political parties, and offers some solutions that would appeal widely across the political spectrum.

In a fashion that’s quite counterintuitive, Trump trounced his primary opponents, and gained Republican Party support, in part by attacking both as part of a political system corrupted by big money.

A key part of 4GW strategy involves the need to publicly delegitimize one’s opponents. During the first Republican primary debate, Trump launched a devastating attack on the legitimacy of his Republican opponents by pointing out that as a businessman he had long practiced giving money to politicians, both Democrats and Republicans – including many of Trump’s debate opponents – to buy access and favors.

In a prior interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump said, of such politicians, “When you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do.” Asked during the debate about the statement, Trump doubled down with,

“You’d better believe it. If I ask them, if I need them — you know, most of the people on this stage I’ve given to, just so you understand, a lot of money.”

Trump’s Republican primary opponents onstage, prominent current and former governors and sitting U.S. Senators did not dispute that this was how things worked, and did not deny that they were among the politicians whom people like Trump bought and sold. He reiterated the indictment with,

“I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them, and they are there for me.”

Trump concluded, “And that’s a broken system.” In one swift and decisive blow, he had reduced his Republican rivals to supplicants – spineless bought-and-paid for minions and courtiers of a corrupt status quo.

On page 29 of The Next Conservatism, Lind and Weyrich are scathing,

‘Truth be told, most Washington Republicans do not hold any core beliefs… Their only goals are to have a successful career as a professional politician and leave Washington rich. These courtiers’ attitude toward the “little people,” those who are not writing them $1,000 checks, is “I’m all right, Jack, I’ve got mine.” ‘

Economic Populism

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The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) is a political organization of local police officials in the United States who believe in an interpretation of the United States Constitution wherein federal and state government authorities are subordinate to local government authority.

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