New! Improved! Asset Forfeiture for Everyone

Scott Jordan

It's been grimly entertaining, over the years, watching the Supreme Court proceed tick tick tick down the Bill of Rights, negating one allegedly unalienable right after the other, while monotonically ratcheting-up the powers of the central government.

For example, with Asset Forfeiture legislation in 1984, the Fourth Amendment was shredded as the Feds were given power to seize property on suspicion (yes, suspicion) of a crime, or even if you just have "too much" cash on you when a cop decides to check you out. The Supremes nodded; this is now a major revenue-generation mechanism for the insatiable maw of the Federal Government [1].

Recently the Supremes cheerfully approved the gutting of the First Amendment by approving the worst provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance "reform" bill, after President Bush naively signed the evil thing saying there'd be no way it would pass court muster... but obviously no exercise in statism is too distasteful for this Court.

Just a couple weeks ago they tossed much of what remained of the Fourth and large parts of the Ninth and Tenth by finding that desperate cancer patients who grow their own nausea-limiting marijuana are somehow engaged in interstate commerce. And so Federal power over the individual ratcheted up once more.

And certainly the Second was eviscerated years ago, while increasingly unhinged interpretations of the Commerce Clause have been repeatedly leveraged over the decades to inflate Federal powers into an ever-grosser distortion of the federation of sovereign states that was meant to be. And so on and so forth, tick tick tick over the years, accelerating in the past two decades and at a fever pitch now.

And so, with this decision, goes what was left of the Takings Clause and more hunks of the Fourth. Call it Asset Forfeiture for Everyone.

As usual, the beautifully-written and meticulously sourced dissent of Clarence Thomas--typically the most Constitutionally-grounded of the Justices--is well worth reading [2]. No wonder the Left hates this guy so much. As with all conservatives, they attempt to diminish and dismiss him as stupid, even illiterate [3]. Read that dissent and see if you agree. Is there any wonder that that odious coward Sen. Ted Kennedy went on record just a few days ago [4] saying he "rules out" Thomas as Chief Justice when Rehnquist steps down?

My only hope (and, quite possibly, the country's only hope) is that the Court's stark left-vs-right divide--combined the sheer audacity of this decision which illuminates it, and the horror that the issue even made it as far as the Supremes--will hit enough people hard enough that they come to realize what is at stake... and where the fault truly lies. After all, it was Hillary Clinton who said, almost exactly a year ago, in the heat of a national election campaign: "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good." [5]. Indeed, it's started.

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Notes:

1. http://www.usdoj.gov/marshals/assets/assets.html

2. http://straylight.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/04-108.ZD1.html

3. http://edition.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/12/05/judges.reid.frist/

4. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/commentary.html

5. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2004/06/28/politics2039EDT0165.DTL&type=printable