Author Archives: eehines

Ending Subsidies

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President Joe Biden wants to end fossil fuel subsidies, per his budget offering.

I actually partly agree with him on this. But only partly, because he’s only partly ending subsidies—those for fossil fuels. He needs to end—or propose ending; it’s Congress that has to do the deed—all subsidies for any purpose in any industry.

Still he could make a major step forward were he to produce a favorable answer to my question:

Will Biden also end the “green” energy subsidies, or will the Progressive-Democrat continue to insist on picking industrial winners and attacking those industries of which he personally disapproves?

Guess.

Insufficient

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There is a move to relocate the FBI headquarters out of DC. Assuming the FBI should be kept as an institution, which is not at all established given the institution’s corruption, naked political bias, and anti-Catholic (anti-religion generally?) bigotry in its ranks from middle management on up, its relocation out of the Beltway would be good.

However, the two new locations on offer—Fairfax County, VA, and Prince George’s County, MD—are not sufficiently far away. Those areas are just down the street a piece, in the Beltway suburbs.

If the FBI is to be kept on at all, its headquarters needs to be moved out into Middle America, to a small town in, say, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, or Nebraska. Or perhaps in Oklahoma, where the bureau also can deal at close hand with the reservation problems from long-term Congressional negligence that are newly exposed by a recent Supreme Court decision forced by that negligence.

Forfeiture

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Robert Frommer had a Wall Street Journal article centered on a case in which the FBI confiscated the life savings of his client as they raided a bank’s safe deposit box vault and snatched up the contents of deposit boxes rented by hundreds of customers, including his client’s. The FBI never charged his client with any wrong-doing, and in denying her request to get her stuff back, the FBI simply said “No,” with no explanation.

What drew my attention even more strongly, though, was Frommer’s penultimate sentence:

Courts must demand justice by preventing agencies from forfeiting property without informing owners of what they did wrong.

That’s not enough. Seizing and forfeiting are two different things. If existing statutes don’t permit courts to bar forfeiture altogether prior to actual conviction, than Congress must correct the statutes’ shortfall.

Further, rather than seizing property prior to conviction—the FBI and too many local police departments repeatedly show how difficult it is even to get back seized property—law enforcement agencies should be limited to getting courts to freeze property pending conviction, leaving the frozen property at least nominally, and formally, in the possession of the owner.

We Got Ours

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And now we’re gonna take more.

This time it’s the infamous Fairfax County, VA, Board of Supervisors.

The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to move forward with consideration of a proposal to give themselves salary increases of up to 45%, even as the county, located just outside of Washington, DC, faces a shortage of police in the midst of a crime surge.

It was an 8-2 vote.

Springfield Supervisor Pat Herrity was one of the 2, and he had some thoughts on the matter.

It is unbelievable that this Board would propose a 37 to 45 percent raise for themselves when our residents are struggling with high inflation, a 50 percent increase in homeowner taxes over the last decade, and in a budget that does not address the staffing crisis in public safety and other critical county positions.

Nevertheless, the fat cats got theirs, and it’s not enough.

At Least There’s One

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One man in DC understands the situation. Metropolitan Police Chief Robert Contee has this radical idea on getting violent crime, at least, back under control:

What we got to do, if we really want to see homicides go down, is keep bad guys with guns in jail. Because when they’re in jail, they can’t be in communities shooting people.

Sadly, that’s a concept that’s too complex for the wonders of the DC City Council, who passed—and overrode the Mayor’s veto to do so—an ordinance that

reduce[s] maximum penalties for violent crimes such as burglaries, robberies, and carjackings, along with abolishing minimum sentences for most crimes.

Contee illustrated the depth of the problem:

Right now, the average homicide suspect has been arrested eleven times prior to them committing a homicide[.]

Sadly, he’s only one in DC governance, though, for whom the simple solution isn’t too complex to understand.