One of the reasons I refused to vote for Trump: the fear that he would escalate the War on Drugs as well as the much-less ballyhooed (but perhaps even more pernicious) War on Property. And now it has begun in earnest.
“U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions threatens to make himself one of the biggest threats to your liberty,” writes Paul Jacob. “President Donald Trump’s pick for Attorney General just promised to encourage police departments to seize the personal property (cars, houses, cash) of criminal suspects.”
And the new Attorney General has delivered. Sessions has rolled out his new policy, claiming that “President Trump has directed this Department of Justice to reduce crime in this country, and we will use every lawful tool that we have to do that,” Sessions said. “We will continue to encourage civil asset forfeiture whenever appropriate in order to hit organized crime in the wallet.”
But the vast majority of civil asset forfeitures are directed against people who have never been charged with a crime.
It is normal Americans who have been “hit in the wallet.” Besides, as Paul Jacob put it, “No one is a criminal, before the law, until proved in court. Taking away property to make it harder for suspects to defend themselves — which is what RICO laws and other Drug War reforms intended to do — is obviously contrary to the letter of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments as well as the spirit of the U.S. Constitution.”
This is a complete return to police state practices, an amazing flouting of the rule of law, an affront to both liberal civilization and conservative caution.
The fact that our police and local governments engage in any practice that confiscates property without trial is so egregious it is hard to know where to begin.
Though Trump’s AG, Jeff Sessions, is the one advancing this practice, it is worth noting that Obama’s first AG, Eric Holder, demonstrated his sole restraint in a minor pulling back from “adoption,” the not-very-common process of taking over confiscation prerogatives from state and local governments. Reason’s C. J. Ciamarella explains that politic jurisdictional finagling pretty well . . . and the “logic” of the share-out spoils system, too: “Law enforcement groups say asset forfeiture is a vital tool to combat drug trafficking and other organized crime, and they argue the equitable sharing program provides essential funding for police equipment. The body armor used by police at the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, one attendee at Wednesday’s meeting noted, was bought using equitable sharing funds.”
I have a cheaper, more Constitutional solution that may very well have prevented the extraordinarily high Pulse body count: allow nightclub (and other public business) personnel to conceal carry the weapons needed to take down mad jihadists. That is, reëstablish gun rights everywhere — definitely not rely upon militarized police phalanxes.
We have every reason to be disgusted with Sessions and Trump. But let us not forget that the Obama Administration was actually quite bad on this, too — as it was on so much else. Over the last ten years $3.2 billion in assets were confiscated from people not even charged with a crime.
Think about it, then ask yourself: what would Thomas Jefferson do?
One thing, he wouldn’t be voting Democrat or Republican.
Jefferson started a new party over a similarly insane and unconstitutional federal government practice.
What shall it be, then? A “Liberal Whig” Party? A Responsibilitarian Party? The Receivership?
twv
N.B. Image of Sessions is by James Gill and has been nabbed from Paul Jacob’s Common Sense site. Below is a screenshot of a post by one of my pro-Trump friends on Facebook:
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