Police say civil asset forfeiture reduces crime – new study shows they’re wrong
propublica.org
propublica.org
Say that you like the parks and forests in places like Montana, Arkansas, Utah, New Mexico, etc. You're going to do a lot of driving along state highways with a lot of nice things packed away, and maybe a small water/dirt vehicle.
Most of those state highways have small towns every 20-80 miles where the speed limits briefly drop in increments of 10mph down to 30-40mph. In these towns, if you have out-of-state plates, you will regularly be pulled over for doing 5mph below the speed limit. You can expect a dog to sniff around your car if the patrol has one. You can feel the desire to just take everything that you own; it's palpable. I've gotten enough "warnings" to make a suit out of carbon-copy paper.
That's to say nothing of racial prejudices in many areas of the US, and you'll probably have to stop for CBP checkpoints in states like New Mexico, even in the middle of 80mph+ interstates.
It was a bad situation in 2018-2019, and I can't see it getting much better when restrictions start to lift in 2021. We badly need our courts to strongly re-assert the 4th Amendment.
But I do have a lot of them, and no actual tickets from those areas. I have had multiple K-9 searches with a clean car, and I did regularly get pulled over for doing less than the posted speed limit.
I can't prove that civil asset forfeiture is the reason, but my vehicle would have been a juicy target because of the things attached to it.
Almost sounds like the police can pull over and search whoever they like, weird.
The course material mentioned a couple of times that, quote, "driving at an unsafe speed" is illegal. And what's unsafe takes into account the prevailing conditions (so you can be ticketed when going the speed limit if, say, it's raining), and also the fact that deltas in speed are more dangerous than absolute speed (so if the speed limit is 55, everybody else is going 60, and you're going 40, you may well get a ticket 'cause you're creating a danger.
Almost sounds like the police can pull over and search whoever they like
Yep, that's true within 100 miles of the border - an area that accounts for the vast majority of US residents. I've been stopped several times near the Mexico border for no real reason; one office asks me questions for a minute or two, just long enough for their drug-sniffing dog to make the full round of my car and come up empty.
> Yep, that's true within 100 miles of the border - an area that accounts for the vast majority of US residents.
If you're outside that 100 miles they can just make something up.
I find that very interesting.
It really depends on locale; Some states (hello states rights southern states) have a 10 - 15mph speed trap (reform the police) style law from the speed limits in 1975. Some people drive on military bases, where, if they go 1mph over, it can affect their career.
I remember once driving through West Texas on US-90 (the highway, not the interstate) in the evening on a cross-country drive. I don't think I passed more than a handful of cars, if that, but after barely missing several antelope despite driving well under the speed limit, I just called it a night and pulled into the next motel I found.
It really drove home the point that the dangers aren't only the obvious ones. So even on a straight, empty road as flat as Kansas[1] and in broad daylight I would never go so fast. Who knows what might jump out at you, from any which way.
[1] I've driven US-50 coast-to-coast. Not much of interest in Kansas other than experiencing exactly how flat it is, particularly the western portion coming down from Colorado.
If your going to speed, at least make sure your car is in good shape the best you can.
Large animals are part of the reason most people I know who can afford to do so drive large pickups and SUVs around these parts. My mother-in-law seems to have a deer run-in every other year.
Just because you think you're alone on a road doesn't mean you actually are. I'm not clutching pearls. I grew up in a rural area with relatively long (but not Texas long) distances between points of interest, and where people often flew down rural county roads. There're reasons car accidents are so frequent out in those parts. You get lulled into a sense of complacency until the tragic moment you realize your perception was wrong. Having grew up in said rural area, I'm probably less risk averse than most people. But I don't feel the need to point out the crazy stuff I've done or seen growing up to establish my credibility; some stuff is just objectively dangerous to oneself and bystanders, and driving 100mph on American public roads is one of them. And, to be clear, pointing out the danger is not the same thing as admonishing people for doing it. Pretending it's anything else but dangerous, though, just leads to people making even more dangerous decisions. The OP said the law was dumb; it's not dumb because it is dangerous. Full stop.
I live in Florida now; sheriff’s deputies in my county are very chill. They wave and say hello, and they don’t care why there’s something weird in the back of my truck.
There was even a time when I was distracted, and drove partially through a red light (in Queens), and the car coming from the other side was a NYPD cruiser. If I hadn't braked, I would have hit them. The officers inside the NYPD cruiser glared at me (with a very angry face), and I braked, and then reversed back to behind the red light. But they went on their way (and didn't give me a ticket or anything). I'm not sure why my experience has been so different. Maybe the NYPD changed after wave of BLM/etc. protests that started in 2014?
That is to say just because it didn’t happen to you doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen - and because it happened to other people, we know it does happen in spite of it never having happened to you.
There is 100% chance I will lose a substantial amount of money due to a lockdown, there is %99+ chance I will survive the virus. Of course this risk profile isn't for everyone but that's the beauty of personal liberty: the freedom to make the choice that's right for you.
But your personal choice does determine if you put the lives of not only everyone around you but also your entire community at risk. Does that count for anything?
I live in an area that isn't Florida but does not adhere to quarantine guidelines. Personally, I don't know of anyone who has been sick. We wash our hands and take basic precautions and anecdotally that has been sufficient.
Personal disclaimer: I am anti lockdown. This is causing substantial damage to our economy and I depend on my community having the financial means to purchase my services and products.
I work in construction and the majority of the jobsites do not wear masks. We are all ok. If you are feeling sick then don't be an asshole and show up to work. Everyone I know has followed this basic guideline. Of course you will say you can have it and be asymptomatic etc and we could discuss this ad nauseum but I will just tell you I am not open to changing my mind. I have an absolutism mentality on this position. I don't think we know enough about the virus to make these types of detrimental restrictions. For example we now know putting someone on a ventilator for an extended period of time typically does more harm than good.
That's not the point of using a mask at all. It never was, to begin with.
Masks are intended to limit or eliminate the chance you infect people around you. Sure, they also help you not breed in particles, but masks are quite literally a filter you place over your mouth and nose to stop the droplets you're emitting from spreading around.
The rationale is that covid carriers can spread the disease for over a week without even suspecting they have it. They spread the disease by spraying infected droplets through their airways. Thus, the right thing to do is to be on the safe side and ensure we cannot contribute to spread the disease.
If the whole community acts responsibly and takes basic measures to stop the disease from spreading, the disease stops spreading and the epidemic is reigned in.
You wear a mask to protect the community and ensure everyone around you stays safe. You're intentionally putting everyone around you and everyone you contact with at risk if you not only refuse to take basic precautions such as wearing a mask but also engage with people who also refuse to do so.
Another friend of mine is a retired NYPD lieutenant and I forgot exactly what happened but he told me a story of someone claiming to be innocent and his response was "How do you think I became lieutenant?"
Don't fuck with the white shirts.
I've rarely been stopped and never felt like the police were trying to seize my vehicle or acting more intensely than the situation warrants.
I don't know what the difference is, but I can second GP's statement that the experience you and GGP had isn't universal.
I know it happens, and for some unlucky people it happens more than once, but I think discussions like this tend to overstate how often it occurs because of self selection bias.
> I can tell you right now, police in rural areas absolutely _are_ looking for any and every excuse in the book to pull you over, search your vehicle, and question you far more intensely than the situation warrants.
As was the root comment in this thread:
> In these towns, if you have out-of-state plates, you will regularly be pulled over for doing 5mph below the speed limit. You can expect a dog to sniff around your car if the patrol has one.
That's what I'm disputing here, not the injustice of CAF when it happens. Even people who oppose civil asset forfeiture (including me) still feel comfortable traveling throughout the nation.
I would not call that "implying the norm".
Regardless, CAF needs to be abolished and I wish the crowd that cares so much about the Constitution would care about Amendments that aren't the 2nd and 1st.
How frequent should that problem be until it's recognized as a problem?
From where I'm standing, civil asset forfeiture sounds like blatant corruption and outright stealing made good on paper.
I only take issue with the suggestion in this thread that we should be afraid to travel around the nation because of these rare events. There's far more reason to be afraid of dying in a crash.
I’m saying I’ve traveled the U.S. a /lot/ in several different capacities (from personal trips to touring with bands) and that rural areas by and large have given me more problems in terms of police than urban areas ever have.
I’m not implying that you should be afraid to travel - I’m saying quite plainly that the incentives around CAF are severely misaligned and that cops are very aware of this fact and abuse it when they can, and that takes different forms but one of those is mundane traffic stops that turn into roadside interrogations.
But then again, our cops aren't exactly despised or severely strapped for cash. They're mostly like the cop from wayne's world.
E.g., a town is off a highway that's a known part of a drug route. A consultant comes in to the police dept. and does a powerpoint showing an average annual amount of drug money they can confiscate in order to fund the police/town budget. And the consultant probably has numbers from other towns who did the same. Boom-- you've got yet another civil asset forfeiture program in yet another small town.
So you get this town's police pulling over a larger and larger set of people who fit whatever description they've taught themselves rakes in the dough. There's a big incentive to do this, and to enlarge the set of who can be pulled because-- until relatively recently-- there has been very little risk.
I'm going to rankly speculate that the value of the OP's stuff he was lugging was high enough for such officers to take the time to pull OP over. But since OP didn't fit the drug runner description and the officer couldn't find any other pretense, they let them go.
I'll also rankly speculate you've carried stuff of much less value visible to an officer who sees you drive by.
Race almost certainly plays into this as well, but I haven't read a study to know the numbers on that.
It seems the courts treat the 4th amendment about as well as they do the 2nd and the 10th.
This is one of the primary things that lead me to be a political and philosophical libertarian, and why I oppose prohibition completely (even for so called hard drugs)
Most people think anyone that oppose prohibition on weed or other drugs simply wants to use them, but for me it is recognition that the War on Drugs has lead to the complete subversion of every single right protected by the US Bill of rights, every single one.
Not just the 4th, 2nd, and 10th, but all of them
Add Mandatory Minimums and Three-Strike Laws to your list of reasons to hate it.
>Add Mandatory Minimums and Three-Strike Laws to your list of reasons to hate it.
But don't forget the economic impact either:
1. We spend Billions on "interdiction" and "enforcement", even though the vast majority of folks who do use drugs that are currently illegal don't have a dependency problem, and treatment on demand for the small number that do would be significantly less expensive;
2. Putting someone in prison costs tens of thousands of dollars a year, and that person isn't contributing to the local economy where they lived, a double negative impact on the economy;
3. The stigma of a felony conviction usually makes most better paying jobs unavailable to folks convicted, further reducing economic output;
4. Building ever larger prisons and hiring more and more prison guards, administrators, etc. takes money away from other, more productive endeavors, often limiting economic growth due to lack of infrastructure, better quality of education and a host of other factors.
So people can make arguments all day long that the War on Drugs is expensive and ineffective and unwinnable, but some people aren’t going to care, because it’s a long-running culture war that empowers the powerful.
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." (H.L. Mencken)
Then I moved to NM and have lived here for over a decade (with NM plates) and have been pulled over once and let go with a warning.
I have to back OP up on the little towns, rapidly dropping speed limits and desire for revenue because it matches my experience completely.
Interstates are a different situation so maybe that's the difference in perception. Or maybe I just got unlucky. There were no dogs in any of the pull overs although in one case they did want to look through the car.
https://texasmonitor.org/in-small-town-texas-speeding-driver...
These are the people who erase the visceral horror of slavery from textbooks, who detest cosmopolitanism, who advise hard-up city-dwellers to simply "move to where the jobs are" (nevermind that they denigrate immigrants). But god forbid you suggest that these small towns aren't solvent, can never be so, that they have to move. That the future for America is a progressive urbanism with higher population density (and the advances in public infrastructure policy that will have to come with it). That's socialism. But dragging travelers out of their cars for a protection bribe (if you're lucky enough not to get Sandra Bland-ed) is a-ok. /s
Yes, plenty of people unjustly have their property seized.
No, the chance of it happening to you just driving through these states on a vacation is very, very low. For example, there were 400 total forfeitures in Utah in 2015[1] and well over 10M tourist visit the national parks in Utah alone.[2]
But yes, that 400 is 400 too many.
[1]https://ij.org/new-data-shows-utah-law-enforcement-overwhelm... [2]https://gardner.utah.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019-TTtrifold.p...
Do you know whether they have in fact refused to hear a case against CAF, or heard such a case and upheld it?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Court_of_the_United_St...
[0] https://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law-reform/reforming-poli...
It ruled that civil asset forfeitures are subject to the 8th Amendment prohibition against excessive monetary fines. This doesn't mean that they necessarily violate the 8th Amendment, only that they are subject to it. Unfortunately, almost every state already has such a restriction on their books and it hasn't stopped CAFs yet.
It's likely that another CAF case would result in the court deeming federal CAFs to violate the Sixth Amendment where the CAF is not actually related to a criminal conviction. (This is conjecture based on certain justices' remarks to the Federalist Society before they were appointed to SCOTUS.)
"The Supreme's" can not be trusted to protect the constitution, and because of their failure the constitution has more exemptions, and holes than swiss cheese
The federal government doesn't have ideas of it's own.
It's steered by elected officials.
Politicians winning votes for "showing strength" being "tough on crime" and "standing with the police", is why some in the government might have a mindset where this makes sense.
Electing better politicians probably won't fix civil forfeiture anytime soon though, because there is far more pressing matters to fix -- say improve police training, or restore credibility of government agencies.
Constructed minds have goals and desires like any other mind. Weather or not the federal government is conscious is another question.
Civil Asset Forfeiture (CAF) goes back to 17th century Britain[0], and such laws were first enacted and ruled constitutional from the very beginnings of the United States.
You won't get any argument from me that CAF is a serious issue that needs to be addressed, but the idea that it's somehow a recent development doesn't comport with reality.
>It's existence is evidence that the federal government plans to continue furthering its encroachment on civil liberties and I truly hope that the people can find a way to get rid of it.
While the Federal government certainly engages in CAF, they took action[1] in 2015 to reduce (woefully inadequately, but action nonetheless) the incentive of state and local law "enforcement" to engage in CAF.
As such, while I agree in general (CAF is antithetical to liberty, is routinely abused and should almost never be used), your characterization of the history and main offenders/benefactors is flat wrong.
It's states and localities that engage in this sort of abuse much more frequently (and much more capriciously) than the Federal government.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...
[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/120799/holder-ends-most-equi...
It’s a modern issue because of what’s changed. Now small police forces in on the cut shake people down in rural America like highway robber barons.
The institution of asset forfeiture is funky and stale IMO but, that notwithstanding, the modern constitutional crisis is that this literal highway robbery likely violates the due process clause of the 14th amendment.
I never said it wasn't (or couldn't be) a constitutional issue. And I disagree that the origins of CAF have no bearing on its current incarnation.
I bring up the history of CAF, not as some sort of endorsement of it, or to excuse its excesses or the harm it causes in our world today.
Rather, I look to history because it's generally an excellent guide to understanding who we are today and how we came to be that way. The old saw, "the past is prologue" is an old saw because it's both intuitively obvious and recommends one (of several) pathway to understanding current circumstances.
As Eugen Weber observed[0]:
"...This is what history is about. Where we come from, what lies behind the way we live and act and think. How our institutions, our religions, our laws were made."
Understanding the thought processes and mindsets that caused those who came before us to meet certain circumstances with CAF, as well as (as you correctly point out WRT the 14th Amendment) how changes in those thought processes and mindsets have (or should have) affected how we perceive and address the issues surrounding CAF today -- and most other things for that matter.
[0] https://youtu.be/XCyO8meahME?t=430
Edit: Clarified language.
It is useful to understand the origins of CAF and I appreciate your comment. I don't think it significantly changes the discussion, but it does enhance and inform it.
Most people aren't even aware of CAF. I think the ones that are, are either folks who have been stung by it or civil libertarians. The civil libertarians appreciate how serious the problem is, but I also think they may have a slightly inflated sense of the preponderance due to the news outlets they follow. In any case, I hope we fix it soon.
And more's the pity.
It's just one more good reason, on top of the many other serious harms (economic, social and personal rights) to the United States, to end the disastrous "war on some drugs."
I'm fine with use of in rem based seizures in the following cases:
1. The object in question is unlawful, or creating a problem, and nobody claims ownership of the object in question. (E.G. police find a stash house full of contraband, and the actual owners don't want to claim it for obvious reasons.) Please note that I would allow for in rem to be used when the owner is obvious if said owner claims "not mine". This of course would not prevent separate prosecution of the obvious person if the state feels they can prove ownership.
2. The owner is known (claimed), but is not subject to US jurisdiction, and is unwilling to subject themselves to US jurisdiction. (e.g. somebody from overseas owns a boat to be seized for non-payment of fees, or somebody from overseas is found to be unlawfully flying a drone in the United Sites and the drone is to be seized and auctioned because we cannot do anything to the actual owner.)
Notice how neither of these are even remotely like the common scenario in civil asset forfeiture.
Your constitutional rights are not absolute. With the appropriate level of scrutiny, in furtherance of a valid interest the government can restrict these rights
That is because you shouldn't be looking to SCOTUS to decide cases based on popular vote. That's the responsibility of state and federal legislatures, either by adding constitutional laws or changing the constitution.
SCOTUS' job is just to make sure those laws are legal and followed. So only legal arguments are relevant.
The Federalists were generally against the Bill of Rights on the premise that it was unnecessary under a republican form of government. The Anti-federalists had pushed for it on the premise that all power is derived from the people and that they wanted protections from possible government overreach (if they were alive today...).
Ignoring that, if the purpose was to avoid a standing army, then what was the intended purpose of avoiding a standing army? Then we also have to ask, who owns the arms of the militia if the concern was a tyrannical government? How were the weapons sourced for the suppression of the whiskey rebellion? Also, how is militia defined (check out US Code 10 ss 246)?
We can also look at state constitutions that were created around that same time and how their wordings do include it as an individual right.
It's a reasonable question to ask the utility of the Second Amendment when the country has, for over a century, held a large, permanent standing army.
If a government has a standing army and becomes tyrannical, it could be hard to abolish that government if the government has the means to use force and the people don't. I'd say that still gives it utility.
Even if it doesn't give it utility, the proper way to remove any constitutional rights is to amend the constitution.
Not practically in this era. Anyone who thinks America's private arms stores would turn back army-backed tyranny haven't heard of drones, missiles, or modern information warfare technology.
The US was held back by international norms in Afghanistan. International norms tend to be softer on intervention for internal conflicts (and the primary source of muscle for such intervention is usually the US; not clear who would step in to keep a US deploying its own army against its own citizenry from committing as many war crimes as it finds necessary to suppress uprising). Contrast with how the US actually fought a civil war, which included 13 massacres and a civilian-targeted slash-and-burn campaign to break the morale of the Confederacy by making the tangible cost of the war felt by the citizenry supporting the military. Ultimately, you can't rebel from a city reduced to bedrock by a nuclear weapon, and the US has a lot of isolated cities that a hypothetical internal military-engaged civil war could use as an example.
The tool that holds the US back from military coup is good military and civilian leadership and the ultimate benefit not being outweighed by the cost (someone who wants political power can work with the existing systems to get elected, or get someone elected who aligns with their worldview). The Second Amendment was not a bad idea, but its goals didn't really bear out in practice (other than, perhaps, creating the doctrinal guardrails that encouraged creation of the National Guard. And even the Guard is ultimately under Federal control, thanks to the laws from '86 and '07).
Even so, it's a preamble, not a qualification. The second part is explicit it's an individual right, not a state right.
Still, I think the rememdy is to amend it out if it is no longer useful; I agree with the plain interpretation that the right is an individual right, not a state right. The preamble can be part of a rational argument for the 2nd Amendment's lack of utility toward the end of repealing it; the argument can start with something like "The Second Amendment's preamble gives justification to its inclusion in the Constitution. That justification clearly doesn't apply to the modern world because modern civil defense looks nothing like what the Founders envisioned. It's time to ask whether the Second Amendment places contortions on proper regulation of deadly weapons that hinder a free and happy society in the 21st century."
Well-regulated includes well-armed and that is what it means in context. How I would put it in modern language:
It's important that a large portion of the populace can be called upon to fight against threats to freedom and society. To ensure that the citizens are prepared to do so, they must be allowed to keep and practice with weapons of war.
Personally, I'm fine with discussing a repeal of the 2nd amendment; it's a perfectly valid question if it makes sense in a modern context. But that question is mostly academic since it's so politically unlikely to happen as it has broad support and the evidence against it isn't supermajority-level.
I think the governing circumstance is that the law is assumed to not be a suicide pact, but I lack sufficient case history to really have the zen of how common-law precedent and the US legislature has squared the circle of "shall not be infringed" vs. various licensures, taxes, and bans applied.
Perhaps worth considering is that two of the restrictions - automated rifles and sawed-off shotguns - come from an era where organized crime began out-gunning the police. This may shed light on the question.
Lots of ways for police to be effective in their role.
Well if we count the fact that asset seizure without a trial is a crime itself (no due process and a violation of the 4th ammendment), then it should be obvious that it would increase crime directly in its actions and and indirectly by delegitimizing government authority.
>No person shall be [...]; nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.
The SCOTUS interpretation of this clause allowing civil asset forfeiture was written by Rehnquist in 1996 Bennis v. Michigan, because the acceptance of such forfeitures was too "firmly fixed" to displace:
https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewconten...
For that matter executing the entire population would be the most effective crime prevention strategy of all time.
We don't and should not do all the things that "reduce crime".
Yet police departments routinely evade control and scrutiny by management that did not come up through police departments. They resist oversight boards. They hide derogatory information about individual cops. All that has to end.
And isn't the DoD much far away from the voter that the police and local government?
Just saying, the two things might not compare very well :)
I think one area this would help is the over militarization. The police acquired a lot of military equipment ostensibly for fighting terrorism. However, with that equipment sitting around, the temptation is to use it for normal police work. If they knew they were risking losing the equipment, they might be less likely to use it when it should not be used.
because civil asset forfeiture is a crime.
> "...I think you'll be back in shape. So, asset forfeiture, we're going to go back on, okay?"
[1] https://www.c-span.org/video/?423663-1/president-trump-holds...
So the idea that the Biden/Harris administration will do any better than Trump on any issue involving the restraint of law enforcement is farcical. If anything, they'll expand civil forfeiture, unless the courts keep them in check.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/3azy98/kamala-harriss-office...
[2] https://prospect.org/justice/how-kamala-harris-fought-to-kee...
[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-14/kamala-ha...
[4] https://www.johnlocke.org/update/flashback-kamala-harriss-re...
In 1983 Biden introduced the Comprehensive Forfeiture Act, which became law in 1984. That's the main piece of law that enabled civil asset forfeiture. That's how cops take property, alleging it to be drug money without any evidence. It's legalized theft, turning cops into gangs that prey on the people. Note that "defund the cops" will make them rely more on this source of revenue!
He didn't just vote for it. He introduced it.
It's amazing that voters knew this and were still happy to crawl through broken glass to vote for him. The alternative was that much worse. I hope republicans find some moment of clarity and let their extreme wing be banished to a third party. It will cost them a huge amount of political power short term, but they need some time in the wilderness to rediscover the concept of principles. We need a sane opposition party that actually has ideas and isn't a general-purpose personality cult.
He built over 500 miles of crime-stopping wall, raised tariffs on China, didn't attack a new country, appointed decent judges, appointed a wonderful person for the Department of Education, put an end to racist anti-American hate sessions at federal employers, improved the H1B visa situation, ditched the Paris Accord, cut our taxes, got that pipeline approved, stopped China from using NAFTA via Mexico, got several peace treaties signed, and cut lots of economy-choking regulations. Just before that virus hit, he got us to the lowest unemployment numbers in recorded history (half a century) for black people and he got income inequality to go down a bit for the first time in ages. He even signed the First Step Act, fixing the overly harsh sentences imposed on crack users by another Biden-sponsored law.
That's all policy that people wanted, not personality. I don't know if that is more reassuring or more terrifying for you.
> He built over 500 miles of crime-stopping wall
Mostly repaired the existing wall which accomplishes practically nothing about illegal immigration anyway
> raised tariffs on China
Started a trade war that ravaged the farm sector, resulting in costly bailouts
> didn't attack a new country
Partnered with Saudi dictatorship to escalate drone strikes, and abolished transparency around them, attempted to start war with Iran by brazenly assassinating a high-ranking official
> appointed decent judges
Packed the courts with unqualified ideologues
> appointed a wonderful person for the Department of Education
Appointed a person who ruthlessly fought against relief for student debt
> put an end to racist anti-American hate sessions at federal employers
Aggressively fought against improving race relations
> ditched the Paris Accord
Went back on a climate policy supported by 70% of voters
> stopped China from using NAFTA via Mexico
Used foreign bogeyman to distract from automation, which has eliminated far more jobs
> Just before that virus hit
Bungled the biggest crisis to hit the nation in decades
> got us to the lowest unemployment numbers in recorded history
Was born on third base and claimed he hit a triple
Overall the biggest signal that they've devolved into a personality cult was that the republican party was so overconfident, despite all signals to the contrary, that they had no platform whatsoever in the 2020 campaign.
Calling the wall a "repair" is far from reality. It is different in size and structure. The new wall is 18 or 30 feet high, cuttable more as a stunt than a practical bypass. It extends at least 10 feet underground as a 2-foot-thick concrete wall to prevent easy tunneling. In some places the wall is both sizes, doubled up with a road down the middle. Much of the old barrier was only I-beam steel in the ground, intended to stop cars and trucks. You could ride through on a horse or motorcycle. Other parts were just 8 to 12 feet high, without any underground protection from tunnels. Instead of being a major operation, a tunnel just required 1 person with a trowel and an hour to spare.
To say it "accomplishes practically nothing" is strange. About half of the illegal aliens present in the United States came via illegal crossings. Those are the ones who matter the most, because they obviously were denied a visa. In other words, they probably have a history that caused them to fail the background check. Illegal crossings also bring drugs to the USA, guns to Mexico (see "Operation Fast and Furious" for when we even allowed it), dehydration in the desert, drowning in the All-American Canal, and migrants getting rapped by their smugglers.
The trade war started half a century ago. It's still a war when we aren't fighting back. We can't opt out. We can fight, or we can accept certain loss. The farm sector provides far fewer jobs than the manufacturing that is lost to China.
Assassinating a high-ranking official is not attempting to start a war. The USA can get away with that, so it does. It's notable that CNN had a few days of loving Trump when he did that; they want war.
It's a matter of opinion about judges, but for certain the top 3 are not unqualified ideologues in comparison to Sotomayor.
Relief for student debt would be horribly unfair to both non-borrowers (like a plumber, car salesman, or marine) and responsible borrowers. The economics term for the problems caused is called "moral hazard". We would be subsidizing expensive low-value incomplete degrees, and thus encouraging more of this waste.
The effect of those racist employer-mandated hate sessions has been studied. It turns out that they cause the exact opposite effect from the supposed intent. When you put a bunch of employees in a room and lecture them about race, they start thinking of each other by race. It brings out the latent racism, raises suspicion, and creates resentment. Race relations were doing better under Trump until the BLM fundraising riots started stirring up anger. Sometimes you have to forgive and forget, but that isn't good fundraising.
People like climate policy when detached from any mention of job losses and taxes. The same goes for healthcare and many other things. Who wouldn't want something if there isn't a price tag? Mention the price, and opinions suddenly change. You won't find 70% in favor of the Paris Accord when you mention the price.
Automation may have eliminated far more jobs than foreign bogeymen, but that only increases the urgency for pulling jobs back from China and elsewhere. If the USA loses 1 job to a Chinese worker and 5 jobs to automation, that means that 6 jobs need to be transferred from China to the USA.
The virus crisis was mostly self-imposed by the states and by the people. The actual virus harms very few. The fact that rioters were allowed to form huge groups while businesses were shut down tells us the truth: the motive was to prevent Trump from having his record-breaking economy. In any case, basic hygiene is a personal choice, not a presidential choice.
There was a republican platform. For a rather democratic reason, it was the same as in 2016. The virus had prevented gathering everybody together, and it wouldn't be proper to choose a new platform without everybody there. No normal person reads the platform anyway, and elected officials aren't bound to it.
They have a lot of history to un-live; but, removing the man that said he wasn't going to wear a mask, and who regularly stuck his foot in his mouth was priority #1.