The Senate recently approved a budget resolution calling for the worthies to set aside enough money to help local governments hire an additional 100,000 police nationwide.

The vote was 95-3.

According to the Tenth Amendment Center’s Mike Maharrey, the whole thing is an example of the federal government muscling in on powers the Constitution never gave it:

This money comes will all kinds of strings attached, requiring police departments that take the money to follow certain federal guidelines.

Despite selling it as a program to battle violent crime, federal cop funding is really nothing but an extension of the unconstitutional war on drugs. In effect, money incentivizes police departments to focus on federal priorities. Federal priorities will come first whether or not they are really those that would most benefit local residents or not.

Through incentives created by federal funding and the proliferation of joint task forces that combine state, local and federal policing, the federal government has effectively created a national police force.

As former Rep. Justin Amash said of this bit of legislative boundary expansion:

“It says a lot about Congress that so many senators were tripping over themselves to endorse federal funding of local police—an act incongruent with federalism and dangerous to civil liberties by making police forces more dependent on a distant, centralized authority for support.”

Removing local accountability is a time honored, and deeply bipartisan, federal government practice. And yeah…that whole “defund the police” thing? It’s a political messaging tool. And the Senate showed its powerless when federal tax dollars are on the line.