The editorial board that endorsed every expansion of prosecutorial power is now using one sympathetic seizure to brand the Court as defender of individual liberty.
That is the move, said plainly. Ken Jouppi had his $95,000 Cessna seized by Alaska over two cases of Budweiser and a case of Bud Light he was carrying into Beaver, a dry village on the Yukon River. He was flying a grocery run. The passenger had stashed the beer among the bags of food for her husband’s birthday. The plane never took off with the beer aboard. A state trial court found the forfeiture disproportionate. The Alaska Supreme Court reversed, reasoning that alcohol’s documented harm to rural communities justified the seizure. Jouppi appealed. The Court has now agreed to hear the case.
The editorial’s strongest version runs as follows: Timbs v. Indiana, 586 U.S. 149 (2019), unanimously held the excessive fines clause incorporated against the states; the Bajakajian proportionality test is available; and civil forfeiture has metastasized into a regime generating nearly $300 million annually for 45 states in 2023. Jouppi’s Cessna is exactly the kind of case the clause was written for. That is the strongest reading the editorial’s case supports.
The audit reveals what that strongest reading omits. The modern civil-forfeiture regime was built over decades by successive Courts, and the Roberts Court has continued—and in some areas deepened—that architecture. The foundation was laid early: Bennis v. Michigan, 516 U.S. 442 (1996), a Rehnquist Court decision, upheld the forfeiture of a vehicle against an innocent co-owner—no conviction, no charge, no involvement in the underlying conduct. The vote was 5-4. The architecture was bipartisan, which makes the editorial board’s selective outrage even more telling: it is not a left-right failure but a systemic one the board actively sustained.
The Roberts Court has continued to deepen the architecture. Its Bivens contractions in Ziglar v. Abbasi, 582 U.S. 120 (2017), and Egbert v. Boule, 596 U.S. 482 (2022), closed the implied damages remedy that would allow victims of federal-officer constitutional violations to recover in civil suit. The Court’s standing contraction in TransUnion v. Ramirez, 594 U.S. 413 (2021), denied standing to 6,332 of 8,185 class members in a statutory-consumer-protection case. The Court’s qualified-immunity doctrine, repeatedly reaffirmed and tightened (Mullenix v. Luna, 577 U.S. 7 (2015)), shields officers from suit unless a prior published opinion involved near-identical facts. No right to counsel in civil forfeiture proceedings means most people whose property is seized cannot afford to challenge it. The regime operates because the Court’s doctrinal architecture has made it operateable.
The editorial celebrates Timbs and Jouppi as evidence the Court defends individuals against state power. Timbs was unanimous. It was also a selective-incorporation decision—the Court incorporated the excessive fines clause through the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause while leaving the Privileges or Immunities Clause, where the incorporation argument was doctrinally stronger, undisturbed. The Court granted the right while preserving the structural framework that makes it the exception rather than the rule.
This is the pattern across the Roberts Court’s docket. Allen v. Milligan, 599 U.S. 1 (2023), preserved a VRA §2 claim in Alabama—but Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013), had already gutted §4(b)‘s preclearance regime, and Louisiana v. Callais, 608 U.S. ___ (Apr. 29, 2026), has since tightened the Gingles framework further. The Court issues one opinion preserving a right and ten opinions contracting the doctrinal architecture through which that right can be enforced. The editorial selects the one.
The symmetrical application holds. The editorial board has endorsed the Roberts Court’s doctrinal expansions across the term—endorsements of the major-questions doctrine constraining agency action, endorsements of the standing contraction limiting who can sue, endorsements of the Bivens contraction limiting damages remedies, endorsements of qualified-immunity expansion shielding officers from accountability. The board supports the Court when it builds the machine. The board deplores the machine’s operation when one sympathetic case makes it visible. The editorial invokes “American civil liberties” against state overreach from the same publication that has endorsed every expansion of state prosecutorial and executive power the current Court has sanctioned.
The regime continues. The next Bivens contraction closes another corridor. The next standing denial forecloses another claim. The next qualified-immunity extension shields another officer. The next civil forfeiture takes another vehicle from another person who cannot afford to challenge it. The editorial board will cheer each decision while occasionally writing a column about a bush pilot whose plane was taken over some beer, and the one opinion that preserves the right will be held up as proof the Court is doing its best work.
The doctrinal architecture that makes civil forfeiture a routine revenue-extraction tool is the same architecture the editorial board has spent decades endorsing. Jouppi is not evidence the Court defends individuals against state power. Jouppi is evidence of what it takes for one individual to get his day in Court when the regime the board helped build has taken everything else.