The Lawless President

   Call it a Friday night news dump, a strategy long used by organizations when they attempt to bury controversial news by waiting until late Friday until announcing it, in the hope it will be buried by other stories.
   The president tried a hat trick by taking three actions as news outlets were covering the landfall of a major hurricane hitting the coast of Texas.
   First, he issued an executive order barring transgender people from military service. This raises a constitutional issue of gender discrimination, which conflicts with previously settled questions of whether gay people can serve in the military, and whether women can serve equally with men, including in combat units.
   Then, at 8 p.m. Friday evening, he issued a presidential pardon to ex-sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona, praising the former law officer for his career, despite his conviction for defying a federal court order that he stop discriminating against Latinos in Maricopa County.
   In pardoning the former sheriff, who was defeated in a re-election bid last November, the president did so on his own, without consulting the Department of Justice, which has traditionally been standard practice for presidents considering pardons.
   Legally, a president can pardon anyone, for any reason, at any time. But this time, he pardoned a law enforcement officer who has a long record of illegal actions against Latinos in his district, but who has also been a fervent supporter of this president.
   And in issuing the pardon, the president apparently flipped a middle finger to the New York Times, which had strongly opposed such a maneuver in its lead editorial Friday morning.
   Moreover, commentators pointed out that this president's action sent a strong signal to other renegade police officers that if they were a close and strong enough supporter of the president, they could ignore the law with impunity, confident that they would soon be pardoned for their offenses.
   All this happened on a Friday in the midst of extensive coverage of a major disaster hitting the coast of Texas. Typically, Friday has been a slow news day, and Saturday's editions are usually smaller than other days. Some smaller daily newspapers, in fact, do not publish at all on Saturday.
   The flaw in that approach, however, is that broadcast journalism works a 24-hour news cycle, so there is plenty of time to cover all the stories, even splitting the screen to cover several at once.
   And newspapers, while they might not have as much space for complete coverage in their Saturday editions, actually gain an extra day to prepare even more coverage for the Sunday paper.
   Nice try, Mr. President. But if you keep throwing bad pitches, the journalistic umpires will call you out every time.