Especially when one party seemingly champions “civil rights” or “the little guy”, and the other party champions “small government”. And yet a government employee stealing someone’s cash with no justification does not fall under any of those categories.

As mentioned in the tweets, the bipartisan FAIR act is supposed to reform civil asset forfeiture.

> @RepWalberg filed legislation in Congress (FAIR Act) that could end these seizures. The bill’s stuck in committee since April.

The broken system doesn't mean we don't have the right representation - we have to figure out how to amplify it and fix the system imho

There's a bill "in committee" for everything under the sun. It's meaningless.

And just look at the rogues gallery that makes up this committee. Very few of them would be willing to stand up for this.

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/about/members

Civil asset forfeiture has been a problem for 30+ years and multiple presidential administrations, of both parties.

>reform

I.e. screw slightly fewer people so public forgets about it but law enforcement gets to keep screwing people. They'll never get rid of it completely.

Reform isn't ban

One party champions unrestricted capitalism for billionaires, the other party is in the pocket of pharma, banks and other large corporations (and the management-class that work in those businesses). Everything else they say is trying to sell you on something to try to buy your vote. We have one party of the 1% and another party of the 0.0002%.

I think that is over-simplistic, at least since the emergence of a) a genuine progressive faction among the Democrats, small though it may be and b) an insane faction that's taken over the Republicans who seem to mostly represent outspoken racists.

No, b) is easy to understand because a party of the 0.0002% doesn't sell well at all and nobody would vote for that if they said it out loud. The billionaires also tend towards being insane racists, classists, think everyone below them are serfs and that they deserve their birthright, so those viewpoints are perfectly compatible.

If the progressive Democrats could take over the party and control it then I'd agree with you about a), but effectively what the Democrats can do is controlled by Krysten Sinema, not the progressive wing.

And both Trump and the progressive wing of the Democrats shows how untenable the current situation is, and how insufficient the Democratic party has been.

If you start to view the Democratic party (aside from the progressive insurgents) as being bought for by large corporations, and then understand that all the failings and excuses of the Democratic party are really just delivering to the customer what they want, it all makes a lot more sense.

And when it comes to the failings of the Democratic party -- like Krysten Sinema -- the trick is to stop going "oh if only she wasn't in the way we could have fixed everything, we have failed due to this externality" to realize that she's playing the role that the people who have bought the Democratic party want her to play and she's a feature, not a bug. And there's always been an excuse like that for the past 30 years.

Hopefully the progressives do eventually succeed or else we're likely to get some actually competent fascist on the right wing.

That's because there is a widespread perception that if someone is engaging in a large scale cash transaction then there must be something shady going on even if there is no direct evidence of it (because legitimate business is transacted using checks or wire transfers). This is especially true if the person carrying the cash has dark skin. (Having a criminal record didn't help either in this case.)

>a widespread perception that if someone is engaging in a large scale cash transaction then there must be something shady going on

People who've never carried a sum of cash on their person are often terrified of the prospect and assume everyone is as frighted of as they are.

I used to walk cash from a retail store safe to the bank as part of the morning routine. I've had so many lectures about why I should have never done it. I should have forgone my paid leisurely stroll and "just" arranged an armored truck. Or I should have quit over principal, like it was some sort of uniquely risky job compared to all the risky jobs out there and no owner should ever put on an employee. It wasn't even that much money. One day's worth of cash transactions from a small store in the age of credit cards.

One of my tasks at my very first job as a 15 year old bag boy was to walk with the manager across the street to the night deposit box to drop off cash.

The real risk in ghat endeavor was the manager convincing me to split the cash and run off with it…

The unchallenged near-deification of law enforcement and hardline "tough on crime" propaganda in the USA leads too many people to think a certain way:

1. If there was some civil asset forfeiture, the victim must've done something wrong because cops certainly can't be wrong.

2. If you've committed even a minor, non violent, crime, it doesn't matter how harsh the penalty is, you deserve it.

3. A majority of voters don't see themselves as criminals and aren't hassled by cops like some segments of the population are. They think this will never affect them, so they pay it little mind - until the day it does affect them.

I don’t think regular voters like the policy; they just don’t have any input. Plus there is only so much bandwidth for legislative process, and that’s pretty log-jammed by some hot topic issues lately.

While there may be some hot topics recently, I imagine there was downtime in the last few decades for Congress to stop law enforcement from systematically stealing from citizens who have been convicted of no crimes.

The polls I've seen put support for civil asset forfeiture to around 16%. So there's plenty of public support to end it.

The police are powerful though, and proceeds from this don't seem to terribly well accounted for in every PD. We know the feds and the local prosecutors get their cut, but after that... They are going to throw everything they can at keeping this gravy train alive.

This is why I don't participate, fucking vampires running the show.

If you make it a BLM issue, there is a small chance of something happening. That is the only chance.

Though the Democrats would probably come up with some sophisticated explanation why this particular case does not fall under BLM.

Remember that Biden is the guy who pushed the Clipper Chip.

Do you really think so? Both parties have assiduously avoided making any material legislative moves to address any issues raised by the BLM movement. Democrats have been more eager to make symbolic gestures (renaming things, removing statues, kneeling in the Rotunda wearing kente cloth) but I can't think of one substantive bill that was passed because the BLM movement championed it.

Clipper Chip: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

And the racist crack cocaine laws that destroyed tens of thousands of African American lives.