President Donald Trump’s comments on a procedure that allows law enforcement to seize property sparked much debate in the media and on the internet.

But for stakeholders who oppose the practice, called civil asset forfeiture, the president’s statements presented a learning experience for the country’s chief executive.

Trump’s comments came during a roundtable discussion with county sheriffs last week, where Jefferson County, Kentucky, Sheriff John Aubrey asked the president about efforts to curb law enforcement’s use of civil asset forfeiture.

The question sparked a brief discussion about the tool, which allows law enforcement to seize property and cash if they suspect it’s connected to criminal activity.

In the back-and-forth, Trump questioned why anyone would want to limit the police’s ability to take “a huge stash of drugs,” and ultimately told the sheriffs in attendance they were “encouraged” to take property through civil forfeiture.

The comments satisfied the law enforcement community, who believe that civil forfeiture is a critical tool to curb drug trafficking and money laundering.

“For over 30 years, the asset forfeiture program has allowed law enforcement to deprive criminals of both the proceeds and tools of crime,” Chuck Canterbury, national president of the Fraternal Order of Police, wrote in a December op-ed in The Daily Caller.

“The resources provided by the Equitable Sharing Program have allowed agencies to participate in joint task forces to thwart and deter serious criminal activity and terrorism, purchase equipment, provide training upgrade technology, engage their communities, and better protect their officers,” he continued. “It has been remarkably successful.”

But for civil forfeiture opponents who have been working with policymakers at the federal and state level, Trump’s comments demonstrated a “profound misunderstanding” of the issue, one that left open the door for some explanation from those who want reforms.

“We think if the president knew about the extent of forfeiture abuse across the country, his remarks would’ve been very different,” Darpana Sheth, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, told The Daily Signal.

The Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm, is part of a broad coalition of civil forfeiture opponents who believe the tool allows police to seize cash, cars, and property from people who are unaware of any wrongdoing and were never charged with a crime.

At the heart of the issue is the profit incentive opponents say civil forfeiture creates, since laws in half of the states and the federal government let police keep 100 percent of the proceeds from forfeited property.

And while some in law enforcement believe that efforts to reform civil forfeiture laws in the halls of Congress and in state legislatures are rooted in opposition to law enforcement, Sheth said that’s a misconception.

“Civil forfeiture warps law enforcement’s incentives and puts police officers in this untenable position of having to choose going after money rather than criminals,” she said. “They have to be revenue generators rather than fight crime. Once we have adequate reforms, it would free them to focus on fighting crime.”

Still, Trump’s comments left many unanswered questions, and the White House did not return requests for clarification on the president’s stance on the issue.

If Trump did want to put civil forfeiture “back in business,” as he told sheriffs last week, there are some changes he could make.

Movement in Congress

Each state and the federal government have different laws that dictate how local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies can seize and forfeit property using civil forfeiture.

At the federal level, there’s little Trump can do to change civil forfeiture laws without an act of Congress.

Even if lawmakers decided to move forward with reforms, the momentum is for tightening, not loosening, the statutes governing law enforcement’s ability to seize property, said Jason Snead, a policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation who has written extensively about civil forfeiture.

Last year, a bipartisan group of lawmakers in the House and Senate introduced the Due Process Act, which aimed to make it harder for law enforcement to take property from innocent Americans.

The bill stalled in Congress, but Snead said there’s still broad interest from Republicans and Democrats to pass civil forfeiture reform as part of a broader criminal justice reform package.

While President Barack Obama made criminal justice reform a priority of his administration, Trump’s comments injected uncertainty into the debate.

“We might see some movement in the upcoming Congress,” Snead told The Daily Signal. “But the question becomes, ‘What is the administration’s position and would they sign anything?’”

Aside from congressional action, the president and his Justice Department, led by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, do have latitude in the agency’s Equitable Sharing Program.

Under Equitable Sharing, local and state agencies participating in a joint investigation with the federal government can forfeit property under federal forfeiture laws, which are less stringent than those in some states.

The program also allows local and state agencies to keep up to 80 percent of the proceeds from forfeited property.

In 2015, the Justice Department, then led by Attorney General Eric Holder, made a significant change to Equitable Sharing.

The program allowed local and state law enforcement to seize property, which would then be “adopted” by federal agencies. Once the adoption occurred, the property was forfeited under federal law.

But Holder decided to implement a new policy prohibiting the federal government from “adopting” seizures, and today, local and state law enforcement agencies participating in Equitable Sharing have to be working alongside federal agencies to forfeit property under federal law.

That could all change, though, with Sessions in charge at the Justice Department, particularly if he decided to roll back Holder’s changes.

“We would be taking a step back to where we were in 2015,” Snead said.

While a senator from Alabama, Sessions opposed recent attempts to reform federal civil forfeiture laws.

And he said in the past that he was “very unhappy” with criticisms of how civil forfeiture is being used.

But Snead is holding out hope that both Sessions and Trump change their tune on the issue.

“We need to get in front of the president the actual facts on the ground, the extremely limited protections that are in place for property owners, and the fact that there is a financial incentive that can skew the policies and priorities,” he said.

Galvanized

While there is momentum for federal civil forfeiture reform coming from members of Congress, much of the action on the issue is taking place in the states.

Last year, a handful of states—including Florida, California, and Ohio—passed bills to tighten their civil forfeiture laws.

In total, 20 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws reforming civil forfeiture. In more than 12 states, the government must secure a conviction before forfeiting property.

“A lot of the power is in state legislator’s hands,” Snead said. “If they use that power wisely, they can make some dramatic steps.”

Already, state legislators in more than a dozen states like Illinois, Indiana, and Texas are considering legislation to require a criminal conviction before assets can be forfeited.

And Sheth said Trump’s comments likely provided state lawmakers with more motivation to push bills reforming state civil forfeiture laws across the finish line.

“People are galvanized by this,” she said. “These claims that you get that are unrebutted, that these are made up stories, the people who have experienced [civil forfeiture] or know about it know this clearly isn’t true. I think it sparks a kind of outrage.” (For more from the author of “What Trump Can and Can’t Do to Make Changes to Civil Forfeiture” please click HERE)

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George Orwell ‘s 1984 and Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here have returned to the bestseller lists, as readers prepare for totalitarian rule in America. Many liberals are filled with fear, and some grieve as though a close relative has died.

Lena Dunham, star of the HBO TV show, Girls, has returned with a slimmer figure. She told Howard Stern why on his radio show:

Donald Trump became president and I stopped being able to eat food. Everyone’s been asking like, ‘What have you been doing?’ And I’m like, ‘Try soul-crushing pain and devastation and hopelessness and you, too, will lose weight.’

Filled with despair, some liberals have convinced themselves that Donald Trump’s election is likely to lead to the end of American democracy.

This is odd.

After all, Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee, Neal Gorsuch, is a strict Constitutionalist. That choice is consistent with the seriousness Trump has shown in his first days in office about keeping his campaign promises, and foremost among these is appointing judges who want to hold back the government’s power and reach.

Nobody Panicked When Obama Abused His Power

Ironically, the recent administration which showed the least regard for the Constitution and the principle of limited government was that of Barack Obama. It was Obama, after all, who proposed a health care law that appeared to be a first step towards nationalization of medicine. Moreover, set within that plan were regulations, later overturned by the courts, which required religious organizations to provide their employees with free abortifacients. Even convents were to be compelled to give their novices stocks of drugs for killing fetuses.

The Obama administration further showed its disregard for the Constitution in its unwillingness to act against IRS agents who had targeted grassroots conservative organizations.

In addition, under Obama there was a broad expansion of domestic wiretapping, a wholesale growth of the national security state and increased use of targeted killings of foreigners — and even Americans abroad — who were suspected of involvement with terror cells.

Why, then, are liberals behaving so hysterically now?

All the “Best People” Think He’s a Thug

Perhaps a clue can be found in the Israel of 1977. In that year, Menachem Begin‘s conservative Likud party defeated Israel’s Labor party, making Begin the country’s prime minister. The response of most Israeli intellectuals was much like that of liberals in the United States today: a national media and upper-class meltdown.

Left-wing and center-left parties had dominated Israeli politics since the country’s founding in 1948. Although its management of the country’s economy was often ineffectual, the leftist “Alignment” had the backing of the nation’s powerful labor unions and nearly all of its leading intellectuals. Its popularity was particularly great among secular Jews and among European-descended Jews, the “Ashkenazim.” These groups also comprised most of the leaders of the country’s military.

Your Voters are Deplorable, with Tacky Accents

When it was declared on television in May 1977 that Begin’s Likud party had won the election, the announcer promptly termed it a “revolution,” and it is still often referred to in Israel as The Revolution (HaMahapakh). Intellectuals were shocked and repelled. This was embodied during a campaign event that proved pivotal to the election’s outcome. During a major Labor Party rally, a comedian named Dudu Topaz mocked Begin’s supporters for their accents. Since many were refugees expelled from North African countries like Morocco, they spoke with an accent that caused them to be called “chach chach.” The term referred to their difficulty pronouncing the Hebrew letter “ch.” It was a put-down meant to suggest that they were low-class and uneducated.

Begin responded by arranging a counter-rally just before the country went to the polls. Weakened by a recent heart attack, Begin arose before his followers as best he could and pointedly noted that Jews were one people, no matter if they were from Europe or the Middle East, poor or rich, and that they had to stand together as one in a world filled with enemies. The “chach chach” cheered him wildly and then went to vote. It was these working-class and less educated voters who decided the election for Begin. They liked his unabashed nationalism and his undoubted religious faith.

It was a shock to the Westernized, mostly agnostic intellectuals who had run the country for almost thirty years. They found Begin’s win almost incredible, and they regarded the man with open contempt. This hostility was so great that the country’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, had reportedly refused to even speak Begin’s name.

A Mad Right-Winger has Seized Control of Our Country!

Begin was mocked for his belief in free-market economics, and he was accused of being a terrorist. The basis of the charge of terrorism was a bombing that men loyal to Begin had carried out against the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946. Begin’s agents had called the hotel to warn all inside to leave the building before the bomb was to go off, and they had planned the attack at the request of men loyal to Begin’s rival, Ben-Gurion. Nonetheless, the attack led to 91 deaths, and blame had long been pinned on Begin for the lives lost.

Thus, with Begin’s election in 1977, it was easy for intellectuals to persuade themselves that they had been defeated in the election by a mad right-winger backed by uncouth people who took all their ideas from the Bible. Surely, they declared, Israel’s economy would be ruined, and war with Israel’s neighbors was likely.

What actually happened, however, was that Begin led Israel towards a formal peace treaty with Egypt, and, with lower taxes and less regulation, the nation started on its trek to its current status: a rich nation, that is among the world leaders in technology.

What’s Really at Stake: Loss of Status

In retrospect, it’s apparent that what the “smart” Israelis were really suffering from was a loss of social standing. They had always been the ones in charge. They were both literally and figuratively the authorities. Then, quite abruptly, they had been tossed aside and ignored by the little people. But those Bible-thumpers turned out to be the wise ones.

Is something similar happening in the U.S. forty years later? Time will tell. (For more from the author of “Was Menachem Begin the Donald Trump of Israel?” please click HERE)

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