Judge Andrew Napolitano, speaking with Neil Cavuto on Fox Business, explained that United States Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen‘s apology last week regarding the US government routinely seizing bank accounts based on the mere suspicion that the money in the accounts may be related to a crime is not enough to rectify the constitutional violation. Napolitano charges that “Congress is the culprit” for passing legislation allowing the seizures and that Congress is doing nothing to repeal the seizures authorization.
Napolitano, a Ron Paul Institute Advisory Board member, elaborates:
With the permission on the books for them to seize your assets before you’ve been charged and convicted of a crime, they have frustrated the Constitution, they have put innocent small business people out of business. And it is just plain wrong and un-American that this should happen.
As Napolitano explains, the law even provides an incentive for the IRS and other US government agencies to seize bank accounts by allowing agencies to keep for their own use some of the money they seize.
Watch the complete discussion here:
Read here Carl Menger Center for the Study of Money and Banking President Paul-Martin Foss’s introduction to the US government’s bank account seizure program.
Read here about a similar US government program through which US police, along with state and local police, seize money and property from people’s persons, vehicles, homes, and elsewhere based on nothing more than an allegation that the assets seized may have some relation to a crime. While US Attorney General Eric Holder announced in January new limitations on this program, the limitations are written such that they will do little to nothing to reduce asset seizures.
