Supreme Court Rules Private Property Can be Seized 1829
slew writes "CNN is reporting that the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling in a case where a local community seized private houses for commercial development (not public works) under the guise of eminent domain. Needless to say, the little guy loses to the commercial developer this case...
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Not as bad as it sounds... (Score:5, Informative)
They stated that this doesn't nothing to prevent states from legislating limits on eminent domain seizures by municipal government
Re:All hail the rich (Score:4, Informative)
The votes were fairly predictable... (Score:2, Informative)
For the majority: Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer
In dissent: O'Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas
Them Pesky Conser-oh, wait... (Score:5, Informative)
For the record, O'Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas were in the dissent. The minority. The losers. The folks saying "no, the government doesn't have the right to take private land from some citizens on behalf of other private citizens as long as there are a few extra tax dollars to be picked up in the process".
If you want to argue party politics ("It's all Bush's fault, favoring Special Interests"), there are plenty of threads where you can do so and still be on-topic.
Unless you're so blinded by partisan politics that you consider O'Connor, Scalia, Rehnquist, and Thomas to be liberals (well, at least for today), this isn't one of those threads.
This isn't about Republicans vs. Democrats. It's about libertarians vs. statists.
Re:bush judges (Score:3, Informative)
Re:bush judges (Score:1, Informative)
Guess what idiots don't understand? They don't understand that the liberals on the supreme court voted for this. The conservatives were against it.
Re:bush judges (Score:5, Informative)
Remember how Bush made his money in baseball: building a larger stadium on land siezed under eminent domain? http://espn.go.com/mlb/bush/saturday.html [go.com]
Re:Not as bad as it sounds... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:bush judges (Score:5, Informative)
In favor:
John Paul Stevens - Ford/republican
Anthony Kennedy - Reagan/republican
David H. Souter - Bush/republican
Ruth Bader Ginsburg - Clinton/democrat
Stephen G. Breyer - Clinton/democrat
Against:
Sandra Day O'Connor - Reagan/republican
William H. Rehnquist - Nixon-Reagan/ republican
Antonin Scalia - Reagan/republican
Clarence Thomas - Bush/republican
I'd say toss up on whether more bush/republican judges would help here. Both democrats were in favor, but so were three republicans.
Re:Bogus! (Score:3, Informative)
Nope! I'm frightened by it too.
But let's not look at this as a strictly U.S. problem. In reality, the only thing that the Federal Government did wrong was taking no action (essentially, deciding not to decide.)
FWIW, the CT case is not unprecedented:
Six state supreme courts have ruled that private economic development projects are a considered public use: Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, New York, North Dakota, and (obviously) Connecticut. Eight states have ruled that private economic development is not considered public use: Arkansas,Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, South Carolina, and Washington. I would like to see my state added to that list, so off I go to write to my State Representative.
No, it's worse. (Score:5, Informative)
In this instance, the judges say that local officials know best. (Never mind what the owners of the land think.)
The part that makes this really bad is that the Court isn't looking at the law and the Constitution, but at the circumstances. They're supposed to be judging the law, not making new laws as they did here.
A similar thing happened in the medical marijuana case. The judges said that they thought the "medical" thing was a sham, that this was all about people wanting a way around Federal drug laws. They had no legal basis for that finding, it was just what they thought about the issue. So they allowed the extension of the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution to include the doctor-patient relationship.
These decisions are symptomatic of an out of control Court.
Re:The day freedom died .. (Score:2, Informative)
That said, I think that this idea that urban renewal (extending beyond a blighted area, which has been allowed for a while, for cleaning up slums and such) is a valid reason for taking, seems problematic to me. MBITLITF (My brother is the lawyer in the family), but it seems clear that this is a continuation of a trend to expand this power beyond what I would consider reasonable. Building a hotel and whatever else in the hopes that people will come to visit and thereby provide jobs seems just plain dumb, but the courts basically said that they can't make a ruling based on that; if the government thinks it is a good idea, that is good enough, and to overrule them would be a kind of judicial activism. (See, everyone hates judicial activism when it is convenient!)
Re:Not as bad as it sounds... (Score:5, Informative)
From http://apnews.myway.com/article/20050623/D8ATDSD80 .html [myway.com]
O'Connor was joined by
Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist (conservative)
Antonin Scalia (conservative)
Clarence Thomas (conservative)
O'Connor's dissent was surprisingly terse and (*gasp*) conservative!
From http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/23/politics/23wire- scotus.html?incamp=article_popular_4 [nytimes.com]
In a bitter dissent, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said the majority had created an ominous precedent. "The specter of condemnation hangs over all property," she wrote. "Nothing is to prevent the state from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory."
"Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private property, but the fallout from this decision will not be random," she wrote. "The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms.
"As for the victims," Justice O'Connor went on, "the government now has license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to those with more. The Founders cannot have intended this perverse result."
It pisses me off when people jump to conclusions without hearing all the facts. Next time, please do your homework first. -D
Re:What does "own" mean now? (Score:4, Informative)
In my country (Chile), when the government seizes property, it pays the declared value, the value at which the property is taxed. Since this is normally lower than the real market value, people are even more screwed.
But then, it is not for the sake of private companies...
Re:Actually, it's worse than that... (Score:3, Informative)
I'm amazed at how well people like Roger, G. Gordon Liddy, Oliver North, and Mark Fuhrman do after getting a ton of press under bad circumstances.
Re:Not as bad as it sounds... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:bush judges (Score:3, Informative)
It's the preverbial 800lb Gorilla. Take a bushel of bananas to appease him or be crushed.
New London, CT (Score:3, Informative)
The following is a list of email addresses that you may find useful:
City Manager - Richard Brown rbrown@ci.new-london.ct.us
City Council:
Mayor
Jane L. Glover 860-442-6296
kente219@aol.com
Deputy Mayor
William S. Morse 860-442-0233
billmorse1956@hotmail.com
Councilor
Jason Catala 860-447-3848
Jason_CatalaBOE@yahoo.com
Councilor
Margaret Mary Curtin 860-443-0373
pegcurtin@snet.net
Councilor
Gerard J. Gaynor 860-443-6346
Gjgdeacon@aol.com
Councilor
Robert Pero 860-447-2723
pero6_98@yahoo.com
Councilor
Elizabeth Sabilia 860-437-8031
Sabilia@sdwllc.com
I would suggest everyone writing any of the above, and let them know how displeased you are with thier actions.
Re:What does "own" mean now? (Score:3, Informative)
Gregory Bateson, the American biologist said... "adversarial systems are notoriously subject to irrelevant determinism. The relative strength of the adverseries is likely to rule the decision regardless of the relative strength of their arguments."
erm, read it again..... (Score:2, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Just a thought. (Score:1, Informative)
This is not at all right. Google says the actual rate is 43.7 suicides per 100,000 divorced men, which is 0.0437%, far below 1%.
I don't point this out to minimize your problems, just to show you that over 99.9% of divorced men get through it, and you will too, even if it seems overwhelming right now. Hang in there.
conservative vs. liberal? nope, something else! (Score:4, Informative)
I have no problem saying that, for this case, the dissenting position should have been the majority position, for reasons beyond the fact that I agree with the immediate outcome.
I further have no problem in stating that the 3 of the 4 dissenters are the most consistently conservative members of the SCOTUS, while those in the majority vary from conservative to moderately liberal. (There are no currently no consistently liberal voices on the bench)
However, this does not mean that the majority opinion is "liberal", or even that the dissenting position is necessarily "conservative"; there's somewhat more complex issues at play here.
Let's consider another rubric, in which we consider the "political inclination" of the reasoning behind the differing opinion, ordered by the weight given in their argumentation:
Supporting the Majority:
1. State's Rights / Federal Gov't Defer to State-Level Authority: (the determination of the Conn. Supreme Courts were deferred to); this is "classically conservative" position
2. Strict Consideration of Law and Precedent: this is rather specific to how the SC conducts its business, but I think it's also fair to say that they used "conservative" reasoning in their approach (i.e. they saw no need to disrupt tradition or precedent, and so sought to follow it)
3. Favoring the General Public Good over the Individual Public Good: (the specifics of the case were examined and held that the development planning process was handled above board) - favoring the public good is generally considered to be a liberal position, but in the majority opinion there was little emphasis on the "public good" beyond the state's right to determine what this means.
Supporting the Minority:
1. Gov't may Not Interfere with Private Property - this is a classically conservative position
2. Federal Gov't May Override State-level (local) Issues - during the Civil War this defined the "Republican" position - however, since the Civil Rights movement of the 50's and 60's this has been re-framed as the liberal position
3. Proposed Amendment/Clarification of Existing Legislation - ("Legislating from the bench") - recent propaganda to the contrary, "activist judges" are liberal, conservative, moderate, or whatever. However, this sort of activity may be seen as procedurally Liberal (i.e. it makes waves) just as stricter interpretations make be seen as procedurally Conservative.
My conclusion is that while it is probably fair to label the dissenting opinion as an argument rising from conservative thinking, I could just as easily label the majority opinion as such.
Ultimately, I think we have a conflict between Moderate/Conservative process (i.e. the Court not seeking to make waves) and Conservative values (i.e. the underlying goals and ideals of Conservatism).
Either way this ruling sucks, but it annoys me greatly when
people look at an issue like this and immediately start to draw party line borders. Nuance can be important.
Re:Just a thought. (Score:1, Informative)
Did look at the National institutes of Mental Health.
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/suicideprevention/suifact
8th leading cause of death by males is suicide.
Crazy...
In this case... (Score:2, Informative)
it did happen to me... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:bush judges (Score:2, Informative)
It happened to the liberals too.
liberal (liberal):
Sounds pretty good to me. There's no safe ideologies anymore.
Re:A day that will live in infamy. (Score:4, Informative)
I consider my self a conservative (on economic issues, not so much on social). I live in Northern VA and agree with you on the 2nd part. As do several people I know (who I met in college in CT) who live in New Jersey, New York, Pensylvania (I dare you to call the Jersey guy a hick) and when we read about this over a year ago, yeah, "You can have my property when you pry it from my cold dead hands" was pretty much the summary of our response.
This is one of the cases that make me wonder how long until we have an open revolt in the country. Or something similar.
You can read the whole Supreme Court ruling online (Score:3, Informative)
here is the complete PDF file with the ruling [akamaitech.net], I found it from The Supreme Court website [supremecourtus.gov].
Although I live in the other side of the Atlantic, I wrote about this issue on my blog [wikinerds.org]. I read most of the ruling, and I didn't like it.
Here's what happened:
I wrote this overview quickly from my memory after reading most of the 04-108 ruling. I encourage you to read it, too, as it contains many interesting references to other court rulings too.
Re:bush judges (Score:5, Informative)
It just keeps moving up. This is why I'm pissed at government right now, because they keep trying this sort of stuff, and the courts keep ruling for them, sooner or later.
Re:Pardon, BUT... (Score:3, Informative)
It's America. There is a higher court: the media and public opinion. Use them well, for nothing sells like scandal. Spread the story far and wide. Make sure that every person who rents the new offices, every person who stays in the new hotel and every person who otherwise uses the new facilities know the truth. Make sure they all know that the land on which the buildings will soon stand once had private homes, homes that rang with the laughter of children and that have now been seized by a greedy developer for profit. Make it known to all that a developer that can stoop so low as to profit on such unjust seizure of private property will likely do so again; and at all costs they must be pursued and the truth announced to all they would do business with lest they seize more private homes for their greedy ends.
"It's Mabo, it's the vibe...." -- The Castle
Re:Ford (Score:3, Informative)
-- Parent is Very Wrong -- (Score:5, Informative)
Hardly. The position of the conservatives on the court (who opposed this decision) is that this clearly opens the way for "the rich to own all the businesses and property" precisely because "we're so close to the rich, government, and businesses all being the same."
To quote from the minority opinion of Sandra Day O'Connor, under the majority ruling:
"Nothing is to prevent the state from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall or any farm with a factory."
Adding that: "The government now has license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to those with more."
So, in fact, what the conservative judges worry about is exactly the possibility that this will be used to unfairly benefit the rich.
Re:bush judges (Score:3, Informative)
This statement is factually incorrect. Bork was nominated by Reagan, not Bush.
Dallas Cowboys went to a referrendum (Score:1, Informative)
Guess what neighborhoods they chose to buy out the land for the new stadium? Yup, poor areas of town.
The city will buy the land and lease it to the Cowboys.
Anti-Cowboy groups and affected landowners were all hoping the Supremes would make a sane ruling in this case. Alas, they did not.
Here's the kicker - since the land will be city-owned, there will be no city property taxes, no school property taxes, no county property taxes, no hospital-district property taxes, no
The rest of the taxpayers get to make up the difference.