Is the House of Representatives readying itself to do something to limit civil asset forfeiture initiated by federal agencies?
The legislation has emerged from the Judiciary Committee, so there is hope.
The Fifth Amendment Integrity Restoration Act (FAIR) would impose substantial limits on federal civil asset forfeiture — on the power of officers to grab someone’s cash or other belongings on the unsupported suspicion that it was involved in a crime.
Currently, this power to steal based on zero evidence and zero due process remains untrammeled. And forfeited funds thus grabbed can then be spent by the agencies that did the asset-grabbing.
Victims must spend years in the courts to get their stuff back, if they ever do.
FAIR would require “clear and convincing evidence” of wrongdoing. It would also prohibit law-enforcement agencies from being able to spend forfeited funds, eliminating a perverse incentive to rob people naïve enough to be carrying “too much” cash for whatever reason.
At National Review Online, Jill Jacobson says that the bill is “a step in the right direction” but doesn’t go far enough. Arguing on the premise of innocent until proven guilty, she insists “there is no reason why federal law enforcement should be seizing personal property from everyday citizens on tenuous suspicion.”
Or even non-tenuous suspicion, I would add, for not everyone strongly suspected of doing wrong can be proven to have done wrong. And citizens caught on the wrong end of a government official’s steely gaze should not be regarded as a public resource.
The reform isn’t finished until civil asset forfeiture is abolished altogether.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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The Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution reads as follows: “Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
Not at all clear why this asset forfeiture has been allowed to so blatantly violate the Constitution for so long
Theft under color of law.
The political excuse for civic asset forfeiture was in the attempt — driven by incoherent crypto-moralizing — to punish trade in some psychotropic substances. But, really, we have returned to the traditional nature of the state, which is as an agent of expropriation.
Civic asset forfeiture should be recognized as a tax, within a framework that recognizes that taxation has everywhere always been opportunistic, that the fairy-tale theories of taxation in middle-school, high-school, and introductory college courses on civics, on economics, and on political science have functioned as propaganda. That which has been taxed is whatever seemed to be most readily taxable. Targets of convenience have been wealth or income that has been thought to be easily tracked and measured, difficult to relocate outside of the jurisdiction, or for the taxation of which there is wide-spread acquiescence if not support within the community. (It is with respect to that last aspect that textbook theories have their real relevance.)
The general public acquiesced to the introduction of civic asset forfeiture because the public had been conditioned to despise unlicensed dealers in some psychotropics, and the public presumed a sincere effort to impose these seizures only on those whom the authorities had good cause to believe were wicked.