George Leef’s latest Forbes column offers some advice to the president-elect.
During his speech after the election results had made it clear that he would be the next president, Donald Trump promised that he would be “president for all the people.”
No winning candidate ever says otherwise, but once in office they usually proceed to enact a host of laws that make things better for their most vociferous supporters while doing little or nothing for ordinary Americans. The “president of all the people” promise is soon forgotten.
There are many actions that Trump could take to make life better for ordinary people whether they supported him or not. One of them would be to reform civil asset forfeiture law and pull the plug on the federal government’s “Equitable Sharing” program that encourages state and local law enforcement agencies to collaborate with the feds in seizing property from people who have usually done nothing wrong.
Under civil asset forfeiture laws, the government can seize a person’s property – ranging from cash to cars all the way up to real estate – merely by asserting that the property was somehow involved in or resulted from the commission of a crime. The owner need not even be charged with much less convicted of any criminal action, and once the property has been taken, the government makes it as difficult as possible to ever get it back.
Civil asset forfeiture is an affront to due process of law. It can victimize innocent people no matter their race or ethnicity and no matter whether they’re well-to-do or poor. Most often, however, the people who have their property taken under civil asset forfeiture are poor and minority. And unless they’re lucky enough to get free legal help from an organization such as the Institute for Justice, those people have little chance at successfully battling through the system to get their property back.
