as a non-expert, it sounds like this would only affect federal cases? it's interesting to me that they don't seem confident that they can legislate over lower jurisdictions, despite the argument being that any such laws violate the US Constitution.
While this is federal level, it does help close a common loophole used by states to 'hide' the money.
Agent of the state seizes the money, state sends it to feds, gets back 'clean' money from feds; When you go to sue to get your money back, the state says 'whoopsie, the feds have it, so you need to go sue them' and the feds respond with 'naw, you gotta sue the state, they seized your money'.
I think trying to avoid any challenges by states is the pragmatic approach here. Asset forfeiture has some really perverse incentives, and basically everyone involved except the person whose money is seized has some incentive to ensure the money remains seized. If this bill even makes it to law, expect it to get challenged in court very quickly; it make sense to try to minimize the attack surface.
That's true. As @genocidicbunny points out, there's still plenty of reason that this represents progress. Governments can create and make use of their own dark patterns against the citizenry they're suppose to serve and the interplay of federal and state agencies playing off each other to reduce the rights of victims here is particularly pernicious.
It's also worth noting that while federal law does have some measure of precedence over state/local law... it's not as completely clear cut as you might think. First the U.S. Constitution itself has the 10th amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people". (https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-10/) Also consider that most drugs, such as cannabis, continue to be illegal according to federal law but that a fair number of states choose to simply ignore that in their own law enforcement/legal systems. So a federal law that addresses the federal parts of this problem is at the very least a serious step forward, if not a final step.
While that may well be true in principle, I'd argue the state having free reign to disappear folks' money and belongings for - theoretically - just about any reason or no reason under the guise of "probable cause", without consequences or any path to correcting the issue, is a critical enough problem that (1) it should be explicitly outlawed even at the cost of perhaps some redundancy with the Constitution, and (2) it should have been solved years ago - how am I still hearing about this in 2023 when I've known about this concept since high school over a decade ago?!
