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crime and punishment property rights U.S. Constitution

Injustice Blocked

Civil asset forfeiture is one of those government practices that good people, when informed of it, often express, at first, incredulity. How can something like that exist in these United States?!?

Good question.

One reason seems to be that very incredulity. Normal Americans trust their government not to be evil. When shown that it regularly engages in actual highway robbery, then denial — ‘this cannot be happening.’

But it is.

Another reason it exists? It is so profitable

For those in government, anyway. They get to fill their department coffers without having to ask for tax hikes. They — and by ‘they’ I mean ‘the police’ and government attorneys at state and local levels — just take the wealth. 

Indeed, police routinely “keep whatever they can grab off anybody they arrest, claiming it’s all proceeds or property connected to criminal activities,” writes Scott Shackford at Reason, “and using it to line their own pockets. This incentivizes police to look for people who have assets that can be seized.” 

In South Carolina, Shackford reports, police agencies “across the state had seized more than $17 million in assets across three years. In one-fifth of the cases, nobody was charged or even arrested for a crime.”

Fortunately, there is good news. “Circuit Judge Steven H. John has ruled that the South Carolina’s civil asset forfeiture regulations violate the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights of the citizens.” 

Unfortunately, the fight against this evil practice is far from over. 

But maybe the judge’s ruling will inspire citizens to petition their government and place politicians’ greed into check.

And might not this judge inspire other judges around the country?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Congress’s King

Politics today reveals a troubling dialectic.

Thesis: President Trump boasts that he is going to unilaterally “do something” as if he were Emperor, not President. 

Antithesis: Then comes pushback from political opponents and the media, castigating our current commander-in-chief for imagining himself a lawless dictator. 

Synthesis: This is soon followed, however, by the discovery that the president does have such awesome power. 

Legally.

In our constitutional system, can a president can just wake up one day and slap tariffs on imports? Well, numbskulls in Congress passed a law handing the president that specific power.

When President Trump declared an emergency to re-direct money, appropriated by Congress for different purposes, toward building the Wall, many argued that the president cannot usurp Congress’s undisputed power of the purse. True, but irrelevant. Congress had indeed delegated all these undefined and largely unchecked “emergency” powers to the prez.

Last week, as the trade war with China was coming to a boil, Mr. Trump tweeted, “Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing . . . your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.”*

I thought, “Does Trump really think he has the legal authority to order all U.S. businesses to leave China?”

Yes . . . and apparently he does. It’s called The International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

“One of the enduring phenomena of the Trump era,” University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck told CNN, “is going to be the list of statutes that give far too much power to the President, but that many didn’t used to worry about — assuming there’d be political safeguards.”

Or that “the right person” would always be in office.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


* Note that Mr. Trump did not order the companies to leave, but did assert his “absolute right” to do so.

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judiciary partisanship U.S. Constitution

Heal or Heel?

Call it High Court chutzpah?

In a Second Amendment case seeking U.S. Supreme Court review, five U.S. Senators have filed an amicus curie or “friend of the court” brief . . . that wasn’t very friendly.

“The Supreme Court is not well,” argue Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) in their brief against the Court accepting the case. “Perhaps the Court can heal itself before the public demands it be ‘restructured in order to reduce the influence of politics.’”

A not-very-veiled threat.

Is their goal really to ‘reduce political influence’? Or to leverage influence against the Court should it not “heal itself” — or come to heel — by authoring judicial decisions more to Democrats’ liking? 

Seven Democratic presidential contenders, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Kristen Gillibrand, support court packing — having the next Democrat-controlled Congress increase the size of the SCOTUS beyond nine justices, to 12 or 15.

“[M]ost Americans recognize this tactic for what it is, which is a direct attack on the independence of the Supreme Court,” Sarah Turberville and Anthony Marcum write in The Hill. “It is no coincidence that court packing is employed by would be autocrats all over the world rather than by leaders of liberal democracies.”

To supposedly “depoliticize” the “partisan” Supreme Court, Mayor Pete Buttigieg wants to pick five justices to represent Democrats and five to represent Republicans, and then those ten would together choose five additional justices. 

Nothing like being overtly partisan to vanquish partisanship, eh?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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The Court-Packers

“What if there were five justices selected by Democrats,” presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke explored at an Iowa campaign stop, “five justices selected by Republicans, and those ten then pick five more justices independent of those who picked the first ten?”

Beto, meet FDR.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried something similar with the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937, which would have added six new justices to the nine-justice U.S. Supreme Court. It failed in the Senate, even though FDR’s Democratic Party controlled the chamber.

This “court packing” gambit may have been the most unpopular action of FDR’s whopping three-plus terms. 

Despite the obvious self-interested power grab, “Sens. Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand . . . would not rule out expanding the Supreme Court if elected president,” Politico reported.

“It’s not just about expansion, it’s about depoliticizing the Supreme Court,” Sen. Warren explained . . . with a straight face. Yet Beto’s suggested reform would officially turn the nation’s highest court into a partisan, two-party political institution.

To the good, Democrats are also bantering about term limits for the nation’s High Court. Trouble is, term limits require a constitutional amendment, meaning a two-thirds vote of both chambers of Congress as well as 38-state ratification. 

Court packing, on the other hand, only requires simple majorities of both houses and the presidency. Which Democrats threaten in 2020.

“You need to gain power,” Washington Examiner columnist Philip Wegmann reminds, “before you can abuse it.”

So the abuse, for now, is merely promising.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 


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crime and punishment Second Amendment rights U.S. Constitution

Resisting Registration

Jon Caldara won’t register his guns. He also won’t remain silent about his refusal.

He has lots of company in Boulder, Colorado, with respect to the former, if not the latter, form of resistance — his unwillingness to compromise his right to bear arms.

The town recently began requiring owners of “assault weapons” to either ditch them or register them with the Boulder police. Owners choosing registration must submit to background checks “to ensure that the weapon holder is legally able to be in possession of the firearm.” If you pass, you get certificates acknowledging rightful ownership.

But if you lose the certificates, apparently you lose your ownership rights.

The city defines an “assault weapon” as a “semi-automatic center-fire rifle” or a “semi-automatic center-fire pistol” with various characteristics. In short, the target is “ugly guns,” as foes of gun control sometimes put it. (“Non-assault” weapon: papier-mâché weapon.)

Many Boulder citizens are quietly refusing to comply with the mandates. They “see this as a registry,” according to Lesley Hollywood, executive director of Rally for Our Rights.

Caldara, head of the Independence Institute, is speaking out despite the risk. Why? Because “somebody has to. . . . In this town that spouts tolerance for alternative lifestyles . . . when it comes to a lifestyle they don’t like, there is no tolerance . . . Tolerance means tolerating things you dislike, that you find scary.”

This idea goes even deeper than tolerance, though. It’s about “freedom” and “rights.” 

There is nothing frightening about Mr. Caldara’s unregistered guns, but much to fear from Boulder officials assaulting his rights.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Accountability crime and punishment moral hazard property rights U.S. Constitution

Forfeiting Common Sense

Is it okay to steal if you can get away with it?

A full answer would require a treatise. But most of us common-sensibly understand that evil does not magically become good when perpetrators are not stopped or punished. Thrasymachus was wrong to contend, in Plato’s Republic, that justice is merely the “interest of the stronger.”

When it comes to crimes like bank robberies, muggings and car jackings, we have no doubts about this. In such blatant cases, we suffer nothing like the legitimate confusion to which we may be prone regarding the exact border between adjacent parcels of land or the niceties of intellectual property law.

Well, somebody tell the New Hampshire state police.

Some of them apparently believe it’s okay to steal if you can evade laws against the stealing.

New Hampshire’s recent reform of civil forfeiture laws requires criminal conviction of a person before there can be any forfeiture of his property. But a loophole enabled officers to grab $46,000 of Edward Phipps’s money — from his car, stopped on the road — even though he was never accused of a crime. 

How?

It seems that if state cops collaborate with the feds, safeguards established to prevent such abuse can be evaded.

To retrieve even a little of his money ($7,000), Mr. Phipps was forced to relinquish all claim to the balance ($39,000). Even if lawmakers close the loophole, as they should, the robber-cops will probably get away with this particular larceny. 

They shouldn’t.

That’s injustice, not common sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.

 


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Photo Credit: N.H. State Police