Richard John Santorum ( sann-TOHR-um; born May 10, 1958) is an American politician, attorney and political commentator. A member of the Republican Par...
Richard John Santorum ( sann-TOHR-um; born May 10, 1958) is an American politician, attorney and political commentator. A member of the Republican Party, he served as a United States Senator from Pennsylvania from 1995 to 2007 and was the Senate's third-ranking Republican from 2001 to 2007. Santorum ran for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, finishing second to Mitt Romney. In January 2017, he became a CNN senior political commentator.
Santorum was elected to the United States Senate from Pennsylvania in 1994. He served two terms until losing his 2006 reelection bid. A Roman Catholic, Santorum is a social conservative who opposes abortion and same-sex marriage and embraced a cultural warrior image during his Senate tenure. While serving as a senator, Santorum authored the Santorum Amendment, which would have promoted the teaching of intelligent design. He was a leading sponsor of the 2003 federal law known as the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act.
In the years following his departure from the Senate, Santorum has worked as a consultant, private practice lawyer, and news contributor. He ran for the Republican nomination in the 2012 U.S. presidential election. Before suspending his campaign on April 10, 2012, Santorum exceeded expectations by winning 11 primaries and caucuses and receiving nearly four million votes, making him the runner-up to eventual nominee Mitt Romney. Santorum ran for president again in 2016, but ended his campaign in February 2016 after a poor showing in the Iowa caucuses.
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Joe Arpaio
Joseph Michael Arpaio (; born June 14, 1932) is an American former law enforcement officer and politician. He served as the 36th Sheriff of Maricopa C...
Joseph Michael Arpaio (; born June 14, 1932) is an American former law enforcement officer and politician. He served as the 36th Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona for 24 years, from 1993 to 2017, losing reelection to Democrat Paul Penzone in 2016.
Starting in 2005, Arpaio took an outspoken stance against illegal immigration, styling himself as "America's Toughest Sheriff". In 2010, he became a flashpoint for opposition to Arizona's SB1070 anti-illegal immigrant law, which was largely struck down by the Supreme Court of the United States. Arpaio is also known for investigating former U.S. President Barack Obama's birth certificate, and, as of 2018, he continued to claim without evidence that it was forged.Arpaio has been accused of numerous types of police misconduct, including abuse of power, misuse of funds, failure to investigate sex crimes, criminal negligence, abuse of suspects in custody, improper clearance of cases, unlawful enforcement of immigration laws, and election law violations. A Federal court monitor was appointed to oversee his office's operations because of complaints of racial profiling. The U.S. Department of Justice concluded that Arpaio oversaw the worst pattern of racial profiling in U.S. history, and subsequently filed suit against him for unlawful discriminatory police conduct. Arpaio and the MCSO were named as defendants in dozens of civil lawsuits brought by citizens arrested by Arpaio and his deputies alleging wrongful arrest, wrongful death, entrapment and other claims, costing taxpayers in Maricopa County over $140 million in litigation against Arpaio during his tenure as sheriff.Over the course of his career, Arpaio was the subject of several federal civil rights lawsuits. In one case, he was a defendant in a decade-long suit in which a federal court issued an injunction barring him from conducting further "immigration round-ups". A federal court subsequently found that after the order was issued, Arpaio's office continued to detain "persons for further investigation without reasonable suspicion that a crime has been or is being committed." In July 2017, he was convicted of criminal contempt of court, a crime for which he was pardoned by President Donald Trump on August 25, 2017. In a separate racial-profiling case which concluded in 2013, Arpaio and his subordinates were found to have unfairly targeted Hispanics in conducting traffic stops.Although Arpaio sought another term as Maricopa County Sheriff in 2016, the contempt of court conviction eroded much of his remaining political support, and he was defeated in the election by Paul Penzone, a Democrat who reversed many of Arpaio's policies after taking office. Arpaio was an unsuccessful candidate in Arizona's Republican primary election for U.S. Senate in 2018. On August 25, 2019, Arpaio issued a statement saying that he would run for sheriff of Maricopa County in 2020. He lost the August 2020 primary election.
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