Really? It doesn't seem that hard to understand what motivates Jeff Sessions--filling up private prisons and using police to terrorize poor and minority communities.
Be better.
Forfeiture, bombing the Middle East, travel bans, etc
So much stuff the current Administration is doing that the last Administration did...
and NOW people are losing their shit.
Just a bit questionable for a large part of the conversation to be started now, eh?
And yes people should be "losing their minds" over the elicitation in these tactics.
But there are a large number of people who are only NOW raising hell about drone bombs, travel bans, EO's, Scotus decisions, etc, etc, etc...
Where was the ruckus during the last 8 years of horrible decisions, bad direction, over reach, etc?
I'm not saying it doesn't need to be address... but the amount of "My Team" that goes on is... maddening...
Second, try using Reddit’s search function or Google’s trends app to see just how devastatingly demonstrably wrong your claims about interest in bombing the Middle East or civil asset forfeiture are.
Sort of looks like you’re the only one who’s just now giving a shit, eh?
Bombing the Middle East broke all records during the last Administration... not that this one won't continue to break records, but we were at war for the entire previous Administration and will probably remain so for this one...
I know of many cases of CAF during the previous Administration. I'm sad that the current administration doesn't seem to be restoring law and order to the degree I had hoped they would.
I've given a shit for a long time. I live in a heavily one-sided state and I sit on the other side - so, for the most part, my vote doesn't matter.
What DOES matter is that the stuff people are RAGING MAD!!!! about is stuff that, for a large part, is no different from before. You can nit-pick over minor differences between Travel bans... but there was NO care about those bans for the 8 years prior.
My main point here... is people pick a team... and then lose their shit when their team loses. What's important isn't the Travel Ban (or whatever). Whats important is the "Other Guy's Quarterback" is calling the plays. Even if they are the same plays "My Quarterback" would have chosen - or has chosen repeatedly - NOW we are going to "resist".
The hypocrisy is maddening - from both "sides".
And you'll note, they're not even giving a shit about asset forfeiture, or travel bans—they're giving a shit about people complaining about Trump.
Holder and Lynch at least showed some signs of slowly creeping away from the failed 1980s policies, such as reducing mandatory minimums (http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/12/politics/holder-mandatory-mini...) and letting states experiment a little bit (albeit grumpily in Lynch's case in particular) with legal marijuana laws (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/29/justic...).
Jeff Sessions in contrast is pretty much doubling down on failed 1980s policy. A more trivial but telling example is how Sessions completely embraced D.A.R.E. -- a program that pretty much has been proven over and over again as ineffective.(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448384/)
I hope DARE doesn't return - as you said, the War on Drugs is about as successful as Prohibition... aka: not remotely.
There are many things I like and dislike about the current administration... I don't think I'd like a doubling down on a failed War on Drugs.
Definitely, neither party (at the national level in particular) has been doing what most policy wonks I've read would believe is the correct thing... and I've been reading for decades how America's criminal justice policies (from its high prison rate to horrible policies like civil asset forfeiture) are often ineffective, expensive, and prone to corruption.
Unfortunately, Americans historically has rewarded "tough on crime" stances at the ballot box, definitely in the 1980s and 1990s from what I remember. That probably honestly is the root cause. Even today, a majority of Americans still generally want to be "tough" on violent criminals, even if "tough" might be ineffective. (https://www.vox.com/2016/9/7/12814504/mass-incarceration-pol...) The good news is that Americans are changing their views on non-violent drug offenders -- there's some agreement that locking them up may not be the best thing.
For this particular issue, there pretty much is bipartisan agreement that civil asset forfeiture is horrible. (https://www.cato.org/blog/84-americans-oppose-civil-asset-fo...).
I've heard of some states partially reforming civil asset forfeiture recently -- as it seems typical in politics these days, a hodgepodge of states, led by neither one party or the other (often the reform bills are with bipartisan support), lead the way.
— Reagan attorney general Richard Thornburgh in 1989
Replace "drug dealer" with "minority individual" and this quote would be as accurate today as it was in 1989.
I hope that does not come across as sardonic. If a functional mechanism to curb these kinds of excesses does not exist anymore, that is something which we will have to come to terms with as a society.