Republicans are going to blow this because they hate Obama and Holder. Police departments and their unions are a huge component of the pension liability blowing a hole in state budgets. With all the blowback recently, now is the perfect time to knock them down a peg or two in a way that's going to get bipartisan support if the message is crafted right.
Plus, who's going to buy all that nifty "war on drugs" gear when the police no longer have "free money" to purchase? Republicans will definitely shoot this down for the reasons you mentioned, and I'm sure will also hear from local constituents concerned that they're neighborhood will now be overrun with drug dealers due to this policy change.
Holder’s action comes as members of both parties in
Congress are working together to craft legislation to
overhaul civil asset forfeiture. Last Friday, Sens. Charles
E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), along with
Reps. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) and John Conyers
Jr. (D-Mich.), signed a letter calling on Holder to end
Equitable Sharing.
It actually seems to be a bipartisan thing right now.
> It actually seems to be a bipartisan thing right now.
Virtually everything these past few years has been bipartisan, up to the point it became higher-profile and associated with Obama who (rightly or wrongly) is an incredibly polarizing figure.
It goes all the way back to Obamacare, which was solidly bipartisan (I mean in Congress, not merely in concept) and which Republicans in committee had a veto pen over, particularly in the Senate.
Until it fell directly into the spotlight and became too associated with Obama's platform.
This has happened over and over and over since 2008.
>Plus, who's going to buy all that nifty "war on drugs" gear when the police no longer have "free money" to purchase?
The federal laws that grants military surplus to local police is very, very generous. The sunk cost is next to nothing. Maintenance costs are pretty much it. The militarization of police continues even without this money.
My uncle was a police commander and some of these donations actually became onerous. The one I remember him mentioning were gas masks. As I remember the force was required to have them and while they were given the masks through some grant there's some part of the mask (filter cartridge) had to be replaced every N months and actually cost the department a considerable sum
