I'm not hesitant to say that this is high on my list of government grievances, nearly equal to stupid, unconstitutional gun laws. The Supremes seem to not have a grasp of the issue, at least some of them. This is a bigger issue than Social Security.
ocregister.com
Since 1954, when the Supreme Court upheld a Washington, D.C., urban renewal plan that involved transferring private property from some owners to others, cities have justified their eminent-domain powers in the name of blight removal, which the courts found to be an acceptable "public use." But rust never sleeps, and government officials kept pushing the envelope to find broader justifications for taking property from Peter and giving it to Paul.
In 1981, the Michigan Supreme Court upheld the city of Detroit's plan to remove a thriving 400-acre-plus neighborhood to make way for a General Motors assembly plant. That case was overturned last July by the state Supreme Court, 23 years too late for the residents whose homes and businesses were destroyed on behalf of a powerful corporate player promising economic development benefits to a city.
In July, however, the Michigan court relied on the clear words of the Constitution. Public use means public use, not private benefit. The court agreed with the property owners who had brought the lawsuit that under the current situation, no one in America has secure property rights. If a government can justify eminent domain based on the elastic term "economic development," then any property is fair game - as long as a city finds a new use that will pay a higher rate of taxes than the current use.
Orange County residents saw that in Cypress, where the City Council declared eminent domain in 2002 to stop a church from building on its property, to sell the land at a discounted price to Costco. The city's rationale was clear: Churches don't pay taxes, Costco pays large amounts of taxes. Voila , the transfer is a public use under such thinking. Fortunately, federal Judge David O. Carter thought otherwise, making a sound constitutional argument on behalf of property rights.
But the current crop of Supreme Court justices, with the exception of Antonin Scalia and perhaps Clarence Thomas (who was apparently silent) and William Rehnquist (who was absent), did not seem to grasp the basic precepts at stake in Kelo.
"The rationale for this is essentially the rationale for the railroads, the public utilities, and so on: there isn't another practical way to do it," said Justice David Souter. This is a straw man. The case isn't about roads, but about the transfer of private property from homeowners and small business owners to big business.
Even the attorney representing the city of New London acknowledged that point. He agreed wholeheartedly that it would be appropriate for a city to use eminent domain to take a Motel 6 in order to give it to Ritz-Carlton because Ritz-Carlton appealed to a more upscale clientele and would therefore provide more money to the city budget.
What particularly outraged Susette Kelo was the idea that she would be driven from her home to give that land to a developer who would then build a home for someone else. Under current law, the government can pick winners and losers for virtually any reason, and whenever it does such it invariably favors the wealthy and well-connected over the poor or politically underrepresented.
Many liberals, who claim the high road in their concern for the poor and working people, seem unable to grasp the connection between upholding property rights and helping average Americans.
In a Los Angeles Times op-ed last week, New York trial lawyer Martin Garbus defended the government in the Kelo case, asking: "Do we really want to allow the court to obstruct socially desirable legislation in the name of the property rights of corporations?" Actually, it is the property rights of folks like Susette Kelo that are being sacrificed here for the "socially desirable" goal of a sort of corporate welfare for the likes of Pfizer and the retail and real-estate firms who would occupy the land where Kelo's house now sits.
Instead of sticking up for the downtrodden, liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg couldn't understand what was wrong with the process, given that New London was only trying to<b. "build [the city] up and get more jobs."
Never mind that such promises - building things up - rarely materialize. The GM Poletown plant, for example, although still operating, never came close to providing the promised economic benefits. And look at Orange County's own troubled redevelopment projects, such as Triangle Square in Costa Mesa and the Kaleidoscope in Mission Viejo. |
