Finance

Coolest Republican Bill Ever Would Allow Determined Citizens To Seize Russian Oligarchs’ Seacraft

While this bill has the distinction of being one of the more charming ideas to come from a House Republican in a while, it’s not likely to pass.

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Munich Security Conference 2022 Convenes During Ukraine Crisis

(Photo by Matt Dunham – Pool / Getty Images)

Ukraine needs help. Its steely resistance against the unjustified Russian invasion has inspired many to provide it.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba announced that, as of the beginning of the week, more than 20,000 volunteers from 52 countries have committed to traveling to Ukraine in order to fight the Russian invaders. Ukraine is organizing an international legion, and I’d wager that large numbers of Americans have had at least passing thoughts about joining it.

Our brains haven’t changed much for at least 35,000 years. Our world sure has though. For a lot of people, the mismatch between what we were built for and what our lives now require takes a heavy mental and physical toll. We struggle to find meaning in modernity. We struggle to deal with the tedium of lives spent toiling in order to facilitate others’ excessive material accumulation.

As thousands of brave volunteers are now proving, an adventure in Ukraine — to fight the Russian menace, at great personal risk, with little to gain for oneself beyond a feeling of doing the right thing — might be just the thing to salve some of these overactive Paleolithic impulses.

Of course, many of us aren’t exactly cut out to be combatants. As my girlfriend has repeatedly reminded me over the past several days, perhaps a writer and lawyer with dependents who is now pushing 40 and was medically rejected from both the U.S. Army and the U.S. Air Force as a much younger man isn’t ideally suited to disable a Russian armored personnel carrier.

Still, there are other ways to help Ukraine that require other types of skillsets. One of the more interesting ideas percolating out there comes from Texas Republican Lance Gooden, who introduced a bill in the House which would empower private citizens to lawfully seize planes and yachts owned by Russian oligarchs.

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Under H.R. 6869, President Joe Biden would be able to issue letters of marque and reprisal to private citizens for the seizure of property belonging to oligarchs on the Treasury Department’s list of sanctioned Russians. The bill specifically mentions aircraft and seacraft, but other types of property outside the geographic boundaries of the United States could be targeted as well. To ensure responsible privateering, before issuing a letter of marque and reprisal H.R. 6869 requires the president to demand a security bond “in such amount as the President shall determine is sufficient to ensure that the letter be executed according to the terms and conditions thereof.”

Although they haven’t been used in a while, letters of marque and reprisal were important tools during the War of 1812 and the Revolutionary War, and there doesn’t seem to be any specific legal authority that would prevent us from reviving privateering. In fact, Article I, § 8, clause 11 of the U.S. Constitution specifically reserves for the legislative branch the power to “grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.”

Even though one can imagine a lot of ways sending private citizens off to capture Russian yachts could go wrong, this still doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. Italian, German, and French authorities have already acted to seize yachts owned by wealthy Putin allies. But more than a dozen yachts owned by Kremlin-aligned oligarchs are reportedly docked at or on the way to the remote ports of small nations like Montenegro and the Maldives, where they could be safe from Western sanctions.

Yet, handfuls of enterprising privateers might be able to go where large Western navies dare not. Bloodshed wouldn’t be inevitable either — crewmembers of oligarchs’ yachts (many of whom are not even Russian) haven’t shown a particular appetite to fight physically for their employers’ vessels, and their willingness to resist might be further dampened as financial sanctions against Russia continue to bite and their paychecks fail to clear.

Plus, there are many ways to trick a yacht’s crew onto shore. Surely there’s a good future caper movie out there in at least one of them.

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While Gooden’s bill has the distinction of being one of the more charming ideas to come from a House Republican in a while, it’s not likely to pass. Nevertheless, feel free to join me in at least mentally assembling your own piratical privateering crew.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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