Category Archives: culture

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.

Negative Inference

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Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg likes to jet around the country and to overseas locations. He claims to do this while flying coach on commercial airlines, but he’s also taken 23 jet rides at taxpayer expense on private Government-owned jets. Now he’s refusing to supply relevant oversight data for these rides.

The Department of Transportation (DOT) has turned down repeated requests for information related to the taxpayer costs of 23 flights Secretary Pete Buttigieg and his advisers took on government private jets since taking office.
The DOT and the agency’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) office both declined to detail how much each flight cost taxpayers over the course of multiple months and in recent weeks.

It’s illegal for Government agencies to refuse to respond substantively to FOIA requests (clearly saying “No” with a clear explanation of the legality for that “No” would constitute such a substantive response).

It’s a common practice in cases before a court for a judge to advise a jury that when a prosecutor’s witness obfuscates during his testimony, or refuses to answer clearly or at all, the jury is free to attach the most negative interpretation to those witness failures during the jury’s subsequent deliberations.

So it is with the man who sits in the Transportation Secretary’s chair. Pete Buttigieg cannot be taken as anything other than both in over his head and dishonest. His words are useless, and the only conclusion possible concerning those flights is that they were done illegally, and that illegality—repeated 23 times—should be a fireable offense.

Perhaps it’s time for Government officials who stonewall to lose access to their office facilities through those facilities’ loss of funding. And this step, also, although it won’t have immediate effect, even were it to get through the Progressive-Democratic Party-dominated Senate and White House:

House Republicans plan to vote to defund non-complying witnesses in the government when the new fiscal budget takes effect on October 1.

In the present case, that would mean Buttigieg and the head of his FOIA Office would lose their salaries.

Illinois and the 2nd Amendment

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In a Just the News article concerning an Illinois district judge’s impending order declaring unconstitutional that State’s Progressive-Democratic Party-run government ban on a broad range of firearms and the requirement for citizens to register with that government those firearms they already possess, there’s this closing paragraph.

In federal court, four cases consolidated in the Southern District of Illinois have a hearing set for April 12. The state filed its response to a motion for a preliminary injunction Thursday arguing the ban addresses dangerous and unusual weapons the Founders of the US Constitution couldnt imagine in the 18th Century. Plaintiffs argue the law violates the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.

Which leads me to ask: what would be more dangerous than privately owned artillery and sea-going combat ships? Yet those weapons were privately owned and contributed heavily to the war effort in our Revolution against another government that was, among other things, seeking to disarm us.

For the benefit of those Illinois Progressive-Democrats, here is the 2nd Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Those personages should note carefully that there are no caveats in that short sentence. In particular, there is no caveat for “Arms of which Government disapproves from time to time.”