“This is not really happening. You bet your life it is.”
-- Tori Amos
Cornflake Girl The Supreme Court’s decision in Kelo v. New London, released June 23, 2005, declared that government (typically at the local level) can seize private property and grant it to other private parties. To state the facts briefly, the city of New London, Connecticut condemned an entire neighborhood in order to force homeowners who did not want to sell to turn over their homes to private real estate developers. The city wanted those people out of their homes because, to be blunt, city leaders will be able to shake down the developers and the new owners for more money than they could reasonably squeeze out of working-class families.
Justices Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer declared that the city should have the ability to take houses away for money making schemes at will. By way of reasoning, they suggest that the homeowners had to justify not having their land taken for private use, saying “Petitioner’s proposal that the court adopt a bright-line rule that economic development does not qualify as a public use is supported by neither precedent nor logic.”
Unfortunately, other than precedent (which is wholly owned by the Court and can be either followed or discarded at their whim) and logic (the justices, living in their bubbles, have forgotten that being able to talk oneself into believing what is counter-intuitive is not the same as “logic”, and is certainly not the same thing as “law”), the actual Constitution was not seriously consulted. You see, the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment says “…nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” That clause, in context, is part of a list of things that government is forbidden to do to infringe upon your individual liberties.”
The Supreme Court does not seem to be aware of that context, as it uses that simple clause to mean instead “private property may be taken for private uses that government believes will have some public benefit.” If it seems I am being facetious, I am not; that is the only interpretation that can account for the decision, and it seems fairly obvious that those words have a different meaning than the words contained in the Fifth Amendment.
Even the notion that the Fifth protects individual rights is thrown out the window by this Court, when it says that “it is appropriate to resolve the challenges of the individual owners, not on a piecemeal basis, but rather in light of the entire plan.” In other words, under the glow of a constitutional provision written to ensure that individual rights, among them ownership of property, are to be protected both against government and by government, is to be thought of instead in the light of a collective economic plan. The Supreme Court, in the quote above, has rather eloquently re-written the Fifth Amendment into a statement of socialist philosophy.
This begs the question: if you cannot refuse to sell your property to other private parties, do you really own your property at all? If all of us live under the possibility that local government officials might issue an order to sell to private buyers at any time, then the answer must be that none of us really owns anything. The takings clause, therefore, might have had some meaning at one time, but now seems to have been written and ratified for no particular reason.
Enough, then, about whether or not Kelo is a good decision. If you don’t already see it as a watershed moment in the development of our “living, breathing” Constitution from something that protects individual rights into a half-remembered mythology that is often used as a weapon against the most vulnerable of citizens, then this one editorial is unlikely to change your point of view. It is also unlikely that America’s mainstream press is going to change your mind, either. The New York Times, for instance, would take a “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” approach to this topic, as the Times recently got its land for a new building in New York City by not even bothering to offer to buy it from owners who didn’t want to sell – the Times instead just got the city to order the transfer of the land to the Times, and New York courts went along with it. Examples of outrageous abuses abound; accounts of many of them are chronicled at www.ij.org.
None of this has occurred in a vacuum. With the McCain-Feingold law, approved of by the Supreme Court, marching toward restricting even internet bloggers from expressing their opinions of elected officials, and now the Kelo decision, the two most important pillars and defenses of liberty – free political speech and property rights – have been gutted beyond recognition. Other recent decisions have expanded the power of government in ways that make concern over the Patriot Act seem quaint. If you have not yet awoken to the idea that it could be you and your pet interest that the courts will run over next, I respectfully invite you to visit
www.CourtZero.org and join the discussion about the courts.
As for the homeowners in New London, I have this fantasy that they will, perhaps in a news conference, declare, “Justice Stevens has issued his opinion, now let him enforce it!”
First they came for the Boy Scouts, and I did not speak out,
because I was not a boy scout;
Then they came for political campaigners, and I did not speak out,
because I was not a political campaigner;
Then they came for the homes of my neighbors, and I did not speak out,
because I did not live in those homes;
And then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me --paraphrase of Reverend Niemoeller
