A daily roundup of the biggest stories in right-wing media.
Conservatives ripped Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Thursday over plans to repeal Obama administration restrictions on civil asset forfeiture, giving state and local law enforcement federal authority to seize property from individuals before charging them with crimes. The Resurgent’s Erick Erickson slammed the move in a post titled, “Shame on Jeff Sessions.” “He has decided to expand a positively unconstitutional policy that should be ruthlessly fought in courts and legislatures around the country,” he wrote. “Civil asset forfeiture has long been the government’s preferred means to confiscate property from suspected drug dealers and others. The problem, however, is that often the person is found not innocent [sic] by a jury and the assets are unrecoverable.”
National Review ran a critical editorial on the decision:
In the past decade, the Drug Enforcement Administration alone has seized some $3 billion in cash from people who have not been charged with any crime. This is almost certainly unconstitutional, something that conservatives ought to understand instinctively. Like the Democrats’ crackpot plan to revoke the Second Amendment rights of U.S. citizens who have been neither charged with nor convicted of a crime simply for having been fingered as suspicious persons by some anonymous operative in Washington, seizing an American’s property because a police officer merely suspects that he might be a drug dealer or another species of miscreant does gross violence to the basic principle of due process.
The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway criticized liberals for paying insufficient attention to the issue during the Obama administration. “Just two months before the end of his six-year tenure and attendant support of the program [Attorney General Eric] Holder received accolades for supposedly ending the program,” she wrote. “Some civil libertarians warned that he hadn’t actually ended the program. They were right.”
In other news:
Conservatives derided liberals for criticizing HBO’s plans for an alternate-history series, from the makers of Game of Thrones, about the Confederacy surviving to the present day. “Despite the prospect of a diverse cast, including, presumably, several characters of color exploring tales of empowerment, many people seemingly took issue with the idea of two white men creating a world in which a war to end the enslavement of black people was a lost cause,” Breitbart’s Jerome Hudson wrote.
“[P]eople seem really upset about the fact a show would dare pretend the Confederates won the Civil War,” the Smoke Room’s David Hookstead wrote. “Can you imagine how disgusting it is for writers, actors and studios to make things up for entertainment purposes? I am horrified by the fact not every single thing on television and in the movies is entirely true. What a sad society we’re living in.”
“People are worried and angry about this very problematic development, because it’s 2017 and that’s what we do,” the Daily Caller’s Jim Treacher wrote. “I realize that as a white man, my opinion on the matter is meaningless, but I’m curious to see how this turns out. It might seem like these guys are making a big leap from dragons and swords to something like this, but GoT has always gotten the human element right.”
