An excerpt from “The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy” tracing the rise of constitutional sheriffs.
2021, I attended a rally in Battle Mountain, Nevada, to celebrate the fact that Lander County had become the first “constitutional county,” cementing the county’s lifetime relationship with the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. There, I began to understand the “constitutional sheriff” movement that would threaten democracy, even as we move quickly toward the 2024 presidential election.
The town’s name is misleading, because Battle Mountain is not a mountain but rather a valley nestled among three mountain ranges at the juncture of two rivers where the Union Pacific Railroad still stops to pick up loads of gold and copper. Its most famous event is a yearly World Human Powered Speed Challenge, in which people race small pods on the “straightest, smoothest and most ideal road surfaces in the world.
Security came in the form of a militia whose members wore military-style fatigues in shades of Desert Storm and tactical vests decorated with the Punisher logo — a skull with dripping fangs representing justice outside the law — and Thin Blue Line patches, a pro-law enforcement symbol adopted as a direct response to the Black Lives Matter movement. Most carried a sidearm and a long gun. They patrolled the picnic tables, the porta-potties, the food booths.
They are also the whitest, most masculine, and longest-tenured. As of 2020, only 4 percent of sheriffs were Black, and less than 2 percent were women. In 2020, one Texas county elected its first Black sheriff since Reconstruction. Even though sheriffs must run for office, they often win reelection over and over. Tenures of forty or fifty years are not uncommon. Over half of all sheriff elections are not contested, and 90 percent of the time the incumbent wins reelection.
“I used to have a term for his type,” someone who knew Mack told me, “and I just call them tucked-in. The shirt’s tucked in. They don’t gain too much weight. They pay their bills on time.” CSPOA membership and the influences of its ideas have spread widely since 2020, although the numbers are hard to quantify. In 2022, Political Research Associates, a nonprofit that tracks extremist groups, estimated the number of CSPOA-aligned sheriffs to be around 400. Mack told me that he thought it was now closer to 800, which seems like a gross overestimation to me.
He first mentioned an NBC reporter who was planning a “hit piece” — all press is good press — and said he wanted to be clear on the purpose of the CSPOA. “The CSPOA,” he said, “is about one thing. The notion that all men and women are created equal.” Everyone cheered. “And that all of us answer equally to the law.”
At some gatherings, Mack even casts himself as the valiant sheriff and Parks as a woman in need of rescue, a courtly romance of sorts. “She looked up at me with her beautiful eyes and kind of a scared look and said, ‘Why can’t we just be left alone?’” he has elaborated, providing a bowdlerized version of the story that presents Parks as a victim of government overreach. In 2009, he said, “What does the constitutional officer do today? He protects Rosa Parks the gun owner.
Skousen was an FBI agent, police chief, and anti-communist with connections to the John Birch Society and high-profile members in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His ideas deeply influenced Mack as well as other far-right and anti-government leaders. Mack’s constitutional sheriff movement hinges on a belief that the entire country faces an existential threat, generally framed as coming from communists, socialists, liberals, the media, and, he told me as I wrote this book, me.
In 1988, Mack finally won “the best job in the world,” sheriff of Graham County, Arizona, and he was reelected in 1992 as a conservative Democrat, which is when his interest turned to far-right politics.
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