Jeff Sessions Wants The Cops To Steal Your Stuff!

Poor Jeff Sessions! Donald Trump sat down for a bitch session with the New York Times, and now everyone knows he's Shitlisted with The Shit Gibbon! Yesterday, Sessions was trying to warn the public about hopped up teenagers turning their keyboards upside down and winding up in an open air drug market called The Dark Web ,

It’s called ‘dark’ not just because these sites are intentionally hidden. It’s also dark because of what’s sold on many of them!

But all those rascal reporters want to ask is whether he's a "zombie Attorney General." Which is no way to talk to a Methodist!

We'd almost feel sorry for Jefferson Butterbeans Sessions, if he weren't such a racist old goat. And this week the man has outdone himself proving he's Law Enforcement's #1 Superfan! After he got "Have U Kissed a Cop 2Day"" tattooed on his wrinkled ass, PROBABLY, Sessions managed to piss off the ACLU, the Koch network, Darrell Issa, and the National Review! For you cops, only for you! 

In the early 2010s, Not-Poor America discovered that cops were confiscating a lot of shit from citizens who had never been convicted of a crime. After reading high-profile articles in The New Yorker and The Atlantic, people with power agreed that civil asset forfeiture laws were in desperate need of reform. And people without power said, "Yeah, no shit!" 

Wonkers are WOKE, so you already know about this stuff. But here's a reminder from The New Yorker just to get your blood boiling again.

In August, 2007, Tenaha police pulled Morrow over for “driving too close to the white line,” and took thirty-nine hundred dollars from him. Morrow told Guillory that he was on his way to get dental work done at a Houston mall. (The arresting officers said that his “stories of travel” were inconsistent, as was his account of how much money he had; they also said they detected the “odor of burned marijuana,” although no contraband was found in the car.) Morrow, who is black, was taken to jail, where he pleaded with authorities to call his bank to see proof of his recent cash withdrawal. They declined.

“They impounded my car, and they impounded me, too,” Morrow told me, recalling the night he spent in jail. When he finally agreed to sign away his property, he was released on the side of the road with no money, no vehicle, and no phone. “I had to go to Wal-Mart and borrow someone’s phone to call my mama,” he recounted. “She had to take out a rental car to come pick me up."

It was the rare issue that united Liberals, Conservatives, and Libertarians. Even Justice Clarence Thomas agreed that poor people were getting royally screwed .

Twenty-four states overhauled their civil asset forfeiture laws, and Attorney General Eric Holder reformed procedures at the federal level. The only ones unhappy were law enforcement agencies who couldn't fund their departments by shaking people down any more.

Well, there was one other guy who was unhappy.

So this week Sessions announced that he is undoing the reforms to federal civil asset forfeiture rules enacted by Eric Holder. And he's throwing a lifeline to local cops who've been unable tosteal confiscate with impunity because pinko state legislators have passed those crazy laws requiring a conviction before seizure. If cops can find a federal law that might have been broken, then they can grab the goods on behalf of the federal government. The feds will even allow the local cops to keep most of the money! If, say, the officer "smells marijuana" at the scene, he can use federal drug laws to justify a seizure. Per Governing, 

Sessions' order gives officers a way to bypass state restrictions.

It revives a program called Equitable Sharing or “adoptive forfeiture,” which allows local law enforcement to process forfeiture cases under federal statute and “share” the assets with federal authorities. In practice, the federal government sends up to 80 percent of the assets right back to local departments, effectively allowing them to get around stricter state laws, says [asset forfeiture expert Louis] Rulli.

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions is in favor of states rights. Unless states want to assert their right to stop their own police officers from using paperwork to steal stuff from people who haven't been charged with a crime. In that case, Jeff Sessions trusts the police more than the states.

Liberals at the ACLU tut-tutted their disapproval, of course. But so did Darrell Issa , who criticized Sessions's efforts to  “expand a loophole that’s become a central point of contention nationwide.”

The National Review likened Sessions' order to a gun grab by big government liberals, so you KNOW it's serious.

Like the Democrats’ crackpot plan to revoke the Second Amendment rights of U.S. citizens who have been neither charged with nor convicted of a crime simply for having been fingered as suspicious persons by some anonymous operative in Washington, seizing an American’s property because a police officer merely suspects that he might be a drug dealer or another species of miscreant does gross violence to the basic principle of due process.

The Libertarians at the Institute for Justice called it an "inherent abuse of power" and scoffed at Sessions's new paperwork requirements.

The Department of Justice’s supposed safeguards amount to little more than window dressing of an otherwise outrageous abuse of power.

Even Utah Senator Mike Lee predicted that his former colleague was going to get his ass handed to him in court over the order.

Instead of revising forfeiture practices in a manner to better protect Americans' due process rights, the DOJ seems determined to lose in court before it changes its policies for the better.

So why would Sessions go out of his way to offend every major constituency and the 84% of Americans who favor reform of the country's asset forfeiture law? It's a headscratcher! He can't be doing it just to win votes -- the Republicans already have the Boss Hogg vote on lock. More likely it arises from Sessions's wish to Make America 1957 Again. He's a simple man, who knows that cops are good, greasers and longhairs are bad, and we were all better off before civil rights were invented. So until the lawyers get here to save the day, AGAIN, all you hippies better hand the loot over to Officer Law! AMERICA!

[ Vice / New Yorker / Atlantic / Justice Dept Press Release / National Review / Institute for Justice / Salt Lake Tribune / WaPo / Governing ]

Ad-free! All day! Hand over the loot, Wonkers!