Category: judiciary

Life After Scalia

Antonin Scalia, Justice, Supreme Court, battle, death, Common Sense

President Reagan appointed Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to the nation’s highest court in 1986. Scalia served for 29 years before passing away over the weekend at age 79. May he rest in peace.

None of the rest of us will get any.

Why? An often conservative 5 – 4 majority is gone. The court is now tied, deadlocked, at 4 – 4.

“With the passing of Justice Antonin Scalia, President Barack Obama will make another nomination to the Supreme Court,” explained an email from the very liberal Democracy for America (I’m on a lot of lists). “It is critically important that President Obama choose a strongly progressive person who can lead the Supreme Court and our country in a new direction.”

That’s Obama’s prerogative, of course. But the president’s nominee must be approved by the United States Senate — controlled 54 to 46 by Republicans.

And guess what?

Almost as fast, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell issued this statement: “The American people‎ should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President.”

Now, our Democratic president could negotiate with the Republican Senate majority, come up with a consensus (yeah, right) or compromise choice (watch out).

But don’t hold your breath.

You may also want to plug your ears. There will be shouting. The media will overwhelmingly take Obama’s side — surprise, surprise— and berate Republicans for obstructing.

Republican Senators have a constitutional duty to provide advice and consent to the president’s pick. Unless Mr. Obama’s choice will improve the High Court, those senators should withhold their consent.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Congress, obituary, Scalia, Supreme Court, Supreme Court Justice

crime and punishment general freedom government transparency judiciary moral hazard national politics & policies property rights too much government

Government Burglars

civil asset forfeiture, police, abuse, robbery, Common Sense

If you try to compare those police who take people’s money and property through civil asset forfeiture laws to burglars, who rob folks in more traditional ways, you are just not being fair.

To the burglars.

The Institute for Justice recently released an updated Policing for Profit report showing that federal asset forfeiture topped $5 billion in 2014. The FBI disclosed that in that same year $3.5 billion of value was lost in burglaries.

Then, folks did the math.

Steven Greenhut’s piece at reason.com was headlined, “Cops Now Take More Than Robbers.”

At The Washington Post Wonkblog, Christopher Ingraham explained there was an especially big haul in seized assets in 2014, including $1.7 billion from Bernie Madoff. Moreover, the dollar figure for burglary doesn’t include larceny, motor vehicle theft, etc. All such theft combined totaled more than $12 billion that year.

So, law enforcement isn’t stealing quite as much from citizens as the criminals they are supposed to be protecting us from are. Sort of a backhanded compliment, though.

Recent polling finds more than 70 percent of Americans opposed to seizing assets without a criminal conviction, i.e. innocent until proven guilty, but taking cash and cars and stuff from folks never charged with or convicted of a crime has become a big business for “our” government.

When legislation to mildly reform civil forfeiture failed recently in California, Mr. Greenhut called legislators’ votes “about money, not justice.” Ferocious lobbying by the California District Attorneys Association and the California Police Chiefs warned money-grubbing legislators that budgets would take an $80 to $100 million hit.

Theft is apparently quite lucrative. Who knew?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags asset forfeiture, civil asset forfeiture, law, police abuse, robbery

Accountability crime and punishment general freedom judiciary moral hazard national politics & policies property rights

Our Innocent Stuff

civil forfeiture, civil asset forfeiture, crime, theft, police, abuse, property rights, Common Sense

The Institute for Justice’s new report, Policing for Profit: The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture, details a “big and growing problem” that “threatens basic rights to property and due process.”

Through both criminal and civil forfeiture laws, governments can seize property used in — or the proceeds of — a crime. Criminal forfeiture requires that a person be charged and convicted of a crime to transfer title to government. Civil forfeiture, on the other hand, allows governments to take people’s stuff without being convicted — or even charged — with a crime.

No surprise that 87 percent of asset forfeiture is now civil, only 13 percent criminal. And governments are grabbing more and more. The federal financial take has grown ten-fold since 2001.

“Every year,” IJ’s researchers document, “police and prosecutors across the United States take hundreds of millions of dollars in cash, cars, homes and other property — regardless of the owners’ guilt or innocence.” Then, the innocent victim must sue the government to have his or her stuff returned.

Incentive to steal? “In most places, cash and property taken boost the budgets of the very police agencies and prosecutor’s offices that took it,” an accompanying IJ video explains.

IJ’s report concludes that, “Short of ending civil forfeiture altogether, at least five reforms can increase protections for property owners and improve transparency.” Those five reforms are improvements, sure, but let’s end civil forfeiture completely.

It’s the principle!

Two principles, actually.

Civil forfeiture laws pretend law enforcement is taking action against our property, and that our property has no rights. But what about our property rights!

We’re innocent until proven guilty, too … and so is our stuff.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags abuse, asset forfeiture, civil asset forfeiture, crime, feds, police, police abuse, property rights, theft

Common Sense crime and punishment folly general freedom ideological culture judiciary national politics & policies too much government

Just Doing Our Jobs?

Barber Shop, discrimination, police abuse, Collage, editorial

I didn’t really want to talk about Kim Davis, County Clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky, who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Last week, she got put in jail for not doing her job; this week, she got released.

Generally, I’m for people doing their jobs. Especially, those in government.

However, when they are instructed to do something destructive, I’d prefer they refrain. Unfortunately, government workers too often select the wrong things not to enforce. I could use a lot more “blue flu” over Drug War efforts, or stealing our property through civil forfeiture, or shooting pet dogs.

No such luck, usually.

Recently, a 17-year-old boy was charged, as an adult, for child pornography. But the “child porn” was a naked picture of his own body on his very own cell phone. A law designed to protect him from sexual exploitation was turned against him, making him a “sexual predator.”

The police and prosecutor in this North Carolina case didn’t really do their jobs.

In Washington County, Pennsylvania, a barbershop has been fined $750 for refusing to cut one woman’s hair. The owner claims he has nothing against doing women’s hair, but merely that this particular shop wasn’t set up to handle women’s typical hair concerns. Public servants fined him anyway.

Do we really need government to patrol beauty salons and barbershops for “discrimination” “crimes”?

After all, they cannot even patrol themselves coherently. Witness the messy case of Kim Davis, Democratic County clerk in rural Kentucky. About which I hope I need not say more.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags gay marriage, Kim Davis, marriage, police abuse, pornography, same-sex marriage

Common Sense crime and punishment free trade & free markets general freedom judiciary nannyism national politics & policies too much government

Legalize, But Prohibit?

Pot Pot, legalization, collage, photo-montage, Paul Jacob, Jim Gill

Last week, I warned of marijuana legalization.

Not that I’m against it. But how much will actual freedom be increased?

Note: I’m not bemoaning, as one activist friend argued, that “if you can’t toke up and celebrate in public when it passes, it’s not legalization.”

One cannot now legally smoke tobacco in most public buildings (meaning those open for business as well as government-owned structures) or drink a beer in most public parks or while navigating sidewalks. But you can smoke and drink at home or on certain types of private property.

Ending the drug war and treating newly legalized marijuana pretty much as we treat alcohol and tobacco seems like a long overdo common sense approach.

There’s also the freedom of home cultivation. I have friends who make wine at home, for private consumption. It’s legal; it’s proper. It should also be legal to grow cannabis at home. Yet, many a politician thinks otherwise.

And they are inspired, in a sense, by the popular legalization mantra, “legalize, tax and regulate.” That sends an ominous signal: in order to maximize revenues, politicians see the revenue advantage in forbidding hard-to-tax home cultivation — cultivation that is, let’s face it, a traditional freedom, a right “retained by the people.”

The excuse for this continued prohibition could be “think of the children.” But it’s probably just greed for revenue … and the even more hidden enticements of “crony capitalism,” which plagues almost all industry.

You should be able to grow a plant. And self-medicate. These are basic human rights, and the state should work around those.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags courts, Drug War, law, marijuana, marijuana legalization, prohibition, tax, tax policy

crime and punishment general freedom government transparency judiciary national politics & policies

Court Vindicates Snowden

Sometimes if you postpone something long enough, someone else will do the job.

Last week, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled the National Security Agency’s metadata collection program unlawful, I immediately saw it as a vindication of Edward Snowden and his “illegal” leaks.

It will be hard to charge the man with treason for uncovering programs that have been determined, in court, to be themselves treasonous — or at least unconstitutional.

But I was busy last week; didn’t have time to make the case.

Nicely, Noah Feldman made it for me, at Bloomberg View. “This is the most serious blow to date,” writes Feldman in his May 7 article, a blow against “the legacy of the USA Patriot Act and the surveillance overreach that followed 9/11.”

The linkage with Snowden is in no way an imposition on the story:

The first striking thing about the court’s opinion was how openly it relied on Snowden’s revelations of classified material. The court described how the program was known — by Snowden’s leaks. It also analyzed the NSA order to Verizon, leaked by Snowden, that proved the existence of the program and revealed indirectly the legal reasoning that the government relied on to authorize the metadata collection.

More importantly, Feldman recognizes that the decision rightly breaks “the bad precedent of secret law created by the NSA.”

A republic isn’t a republic if its laws are secret.

Now, of course, it’s time for Americans to cease their procrastination. If we don’t recognize that our government is out of control, no one else’s determination will matter.

Except, perhaps, history’s.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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