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Supreme Court Rules Private Property Can be Seized
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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So what the supreme court ruled was that you own your land, but the wealthy business pwns j00
Do you Gentoo!?
The war against the rich and lower classes is over.
The rich have won.
http://almostsmart.com
Increasing the tax base is now a reason to seize someone's property. Nice.
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
Thank you for seeing through the knee-jerk reaction. Basically they said what the Conservatives would normally say, the states have the power. Rather than limit the rights of the states this ruling gives them more power. What they do with it is not for the federal government to decide.
Want your state to make laws to prevent this? Show up and vote.
-- taking over the world, we are.
Thomas and Scalia in a disenting opinion.
What's the world coming to???
WTF were the other 5 bozos thinking??
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
This is the constitution as it was written: Today, five supreme court justices, who are sworn to uphold that constitution, changed it to read: It is very difficult to overemphasize quite how evil this ruling is.
Three conservatives and one swing.
5-4: One more conservative and it would have gone the other way.
That's why the "filibuster the judicial appointments" battle - a warmup for the next supreme court opening - is so important.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Reading the ruling, I find the dissents by O'Connor and Thomas much more perusasive. The ruling amounts to saying that, starting today, if others can use your property in a way that will be better for the general public, for example if:
- they will pay more taxes than you do now; or,
- the public will find the house they will build more aesthetically pleasing than yours is; or,
- they bribe the local politicians more than you can afford.
then the government can simply take away your property and give it to them.Of course you have to be "justly compensated". However, all this means is you will get back the "market value" of your property, i.e. what it is worth to a random person on the street. That could be very different from what it is worth to you, or even what it is worth to the developer who will get it and profit from it. Unlike normal economics, where the developers will have to pay based on what they can use the property for, the fair market value will depend on what you are using the property for today. And you personal enjoyment of living in a home you've owned for a long time doesn't factor into that.
Do you think Ms. Dery, who is 87 years old and lives in the house she was born in will be compensated for value of that? She only will be compensated for the value of the house assuming it was sold for profit.
I've been showing up to vote for awhile now. It doesn't seem to stop the all out freefall of this country. Next suggestion?
Thanks so much for pointing this out. When I first saw this comment, I went down each of the judges and checked their affiliation. The two democrats voted for this decision. Three other republicans voted for it and four other republicans voted against it.
The original comment seemed to imply that it's the republicans who are the evil doers in this case, but it's in fact the democrats who think it's okay to give authority to a municipality to bulldoze a home to build a Walmart.
Same here. WTF are we coming to? Guess it's time to use the 2nd Amendment Citizen Veto - Some rich fucker kicks me out of my house, there's going to be blood spilled. Sorry, my get-along limits stop there.
Why should Congress limit eminent domain if we can vote for the people who exercise it? The way I see it, if these town council folks don't get booted out in the next election, that's a referendum on their use of state power.
Increasing the tax base is now a reason to seize someone's property.
And that creates a new way around California's Proposition 13 (which keeps them from raising property taxes on your house and land until it sells). Watch for this:
1) Emminent domain the tax-capped house.
2) Sell it to another buyer. (Taxes now at new rate.)
3) Previous owner has to buy a different house. (Taxes now at new rate.)
Old owner is now paying the higher tax rate. Old property is now taxed at the higher tax rate.
Public good: Increased tax base.
Supremes say that's OK, it's a state matter.
Oops!
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It's not really useful to separate the judges by who appointed them, in most cases. What's more useful is looking at their voting history, which makes Souter a liberal on the court, regardless of the fact that he was nominated by Bush I.
And now we have two prominent cases in a row where the "bad guys" are the liberal judges (yes, Scalia voted "against" medical marijuana, but they would have won without his vote, too). Liberal/Conservative is a different thing in the SCOTUS chambers than it is in the halls of Congress.
Traditionally, the behavior of judges is hard to predict based on who nominated them. For example, John Paul Stevens was nominated by Ford, and may be the most liberal member of the Supreme Court. It is not really surprising that the conservatives would dissent, because conservatives value the sanctity of private property, and thus would oppose any sort of government seizing of that property (eminent domain) for any reason.
the supreme court doesn't feel it's their job the decide what falls within the "public good" clause of eminent domain.
It's the court's job, and indeed a grave necessity, for them to rule on matters of constitutionality. Whether or not states set limits on eminent domain, the court must decide if those limits are constitutional.
By taking the position you describe, SCOTUS has nullified the entire concept of "public good." Since anything can now qualify as a public good and pass the constitutional test, it is exactly as if they redacted the words directly from the parchment.
Yes, this means that they effectively repealed a rather important portion of the 5th amendment by fiat.
Private property is now a fiction in the United States. "Property" is now redefined as something that you temporarily occupy under the consent and sufference of your local political majority.
This signals the beginning of a campaign of legal home invasion, as wealthy and politically-connected people will wield the government to transfer the property of others to themselves. Despotism, by any other name.
The end result will be familiar to anyone who'se lived in a radically unjust society: violence.
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I read most of the opinions of SCOTUS, and the dissent in this case was a great piece of judicial writing, and very, very stinging. The dissent begins:
Over two centuries ago, just after the Bill of Rights was ratified, Justice Chase wrote: Today the Court abandons this long-held, basic limitation on government power. Under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner, so long as it might be upgraded - i.e., given to an owner who will use it in a way that the legislature deems more beneficial to the public - in the process.
This is some of the strongest language that I have ever seen in a dissent from O'Connor, and I am sure that it represents one of the widest divergences that this particular court has expressed. I think it will be tremendously interesting to see how this plays out.
My particular concern is that this appears to me to be a sweeping decision that that is being sweetened with the idea of pre-existingh checks and balances that will act as a bulwark against abuses. I simply don't believe this. Given the increasingly corporatist leanings of the executive and legislature, I am very, very sad to see the judiciary handing down this opinion, as I believe now that corporations will be able to force the exercise of eminent domain purely by financial muscle, and with an opinion of this sort from SCOTUS, it's going to be very, VERY difficult for people who want to stand against it.
What price now the Fourth Amendment?
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
By bulldozing your house, and putting up a Walmart, it is a public use because they can collect sales tax -- see, public use.
Well, at least we can still speak against the government, or at least for today.
Fight Spammers!
This point is made by the majority, and nicely refuted by the dissent. The problem is that the people most likely to be hurt by this ruling are the poor and uneducated, who have much less access to and influence over the political process. On the other hand the people who benefit are the rich, who do wield considerable influence. When is the last time eminent domain was used to take away a $1,000,000 home to make way for affordable housing?
To make the point another way, if the electoral process provided a sufficient check over abuse of eminent domain, there would be no need for a Constitutional guarantee against that abuse. The case in point shows the need for a secured right.
You're a self-proclaimed "libertarian" and you don't know whether to support the expansion of eminent domain powers or not?
Please surrender your membership card at the door. Thank you.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
Stevens - Liberal
Ginsburg - Liberal
Breyer - Liberal
Souter - Liberal
O'Connor - Waffler
Kennedy - Waffler
Rehnquist - Conservative
Thomas - Conservative
Scalia - Conservative
Generally speaking, of course. YMMV on particular issues.
And what are you going to do when Walmart is the one taking your house? Shoot 100K share holders? Or more likely, the rent-a-cop, or the CEO corporate flunky? As long as you're making a blood sacrifice, that will even the books? Are you willing to destroy your family's economic survival to prove a point?
You may be thinking a little too small view here.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Or one moderate judge. Or a liberal judge that hasn't lost his mind.
We don't need a "conservative" court. We just need a court with good balance and jurists who think deeply.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
"It's the liberals who want to give away private property - the conservatives want to give away PUBLIC property."
Just goes to show you that the sides aren't so clearly defined. We need to oppose dangerous ideas, not the liberals or the conservatives.
. . . These people were offered on average $1.7 million
.
The amount they were offered is irrelevant. If they didn't want to sell, the government shouldn't compel it for commercial development. Schools and roads are one thing, strip malls and hotels are another.
In general the government is only supposed to do this stuff . .
When has the government (on any level) stopped at what it's supposed to do? In several of the places I've lived, the local government was effectively an extension of the local real-estate developers. Do you expect them to do the right thing? I sure don't.
. . . ou say the same thing when they had to take a few houses in order to start providing running water for people for the first time?
There's a huge difference between providing public services and building a strip mall.
'I ain't a liar, baby, and I ain't proud I just want what I'm not allowed.' -- Violent Femmes, 36-24-36
Decisions like this breed domestic terrorism.
Someone hates these cans.
In short, the ruling today has decided that being in the 'public good' is simply a matter of being 'generally kind of better than what was there before, maybe' (although specifically, they find that there is no burden on the developer to ensure that the 'public good' is ever actually realized).
Basically, private property owners like you and me get the shaft when developers decide they can do something more publicly beneificial with our land than we can. Totally nuts.
From the dissent:
/. (I've been hammered here before for it.). But what about private property that simply doesn't generate tax revenue?
"Today the Court abandons this long-held, basic limitation on government power. Under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner, so long as it might be upgraded--i.e., given to an owner who will use it in a way that the legislature deems more beneficial to the public--in the process."
The sole argument for the misappropriation of these properties seems to be that the overall tax coffers would benefit. That is, there will be higher property, income, and sales taxes due to the economic development.
Now, I'm as pro-business as you'll find on
Churches would be poster-children here: they provide no tax revenue (property, sales, etc), and generally, they exist in spite of popular opinion: a 80% baptist (or catholic/muslim/jewish/etc) community could very easily decide that the property of a minority religion's church is simply expendable.
This opens doors of corruption, discrimination, and hatred on a scale that simply frightens me.
I hope they designate a church on one of those properties quickly (before the bulldozers get there) so that this goes back up on a (slightly) stronger ammendment claim (the First!).
One final thought: I have yet to find ANYONE who thinks this is a good idea! I've heard people blame it on the "corporate elite" (presumably right-wing), and on the "socialists and statists", but nobody's claiming this as their own! How do we get a majory of justices on the SCOTUS that nobody agrees with??
The court tends to be conservative, only not in the conventional political sense. It tends to narrowly rule in such a way as to err on the side of caution and with tradition, though there are exceptions to it. This is one of the things that encourages many people following the Grokster case, in that the court is usually loathe to overturn precedent, particularly that which it explicitly set in very clear terms in the relatively recent past.
Decisions like Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade that make significant changes in how the Constitution is interpreted are fairly rare. Right now, there are two appellate decisions on the Second Amendment that stand in almost direct contradiction to each other, with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that the right to bear arms is an individual right, while the Ninth Circuit ruled that there is no individual right. When the opportunity came up to decide the issue, the Supreme Court declined because, I suspect, they were not willing to dive into those admittedly troublesome waters.
They're also very pedantic. Several recent decisions were turned away or dismissed entirely because the person making the challenge did not hold proper standing. They insist that proper procedures and protocol are followed to the letter, and have little patience for those who do otherwise.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
If you're likely to fit into the group that buys a house and stays put until you die then you could be harmed by this ruling.
A person who buys and works 30 years to pay off their house in anticipation of living on their retirement (Fixed income). Typically these neighborhoods will go down in value as the houses age over the years. The property will probably retain or increase in value.
Perhaps it's lakefront property that you bought 30 years ago when the city did not even incorporate in that area and you were rural. But urban sprawl eventually caused to be in the city's influence.
Now the city is looking for more tax revenue due to their overspending and have limited options for development. Rather than raise the taxes on the whole to make up for this, or the citizens deal with the big spenders through the elective process those council members hear from private developers that you have some land they are interested in. So they begin the process of condeming property to allow the developer to take over.
Now the neighborhood is a bit run down but it's a quality place to live and many living there are fixed income retirees. The city is now telling them to move and a house that normally woudl be worth 200,000 dollars is only being offered 60,000 dollars. These people cannot afford to move because nowhere in the immediate area can you buy a brand new house for 60,000 dollars. In fact that barely would make the 20% payment requirements now due to inflation.
So in essence you're kicking these people on the streets, or they get new houses and work till the day they die and instead of their house going to their kids or grandchildren it gets repossessed and your investement for the enjoyment of your family is gone forever.
The only way it can be fair compensation is if these people are relocated into a paid off house with sufficient tax breaks on the house as to facilitate the ability to live as before with possibly some money on the side to help with the loss of a treasured property. To not offer that at the minimum should be illegal. The developer could afford it, and there's no reason they can just come along and uproot your entire life and financial future just to build something so they can make money.
This was a constitutional question. The so-called "liberal" judges restrained the issue to whether the local government had abused their power and simply established that, yes, they clearly had the "public good" in mind and were compensating the owners of the property. The fifth amendment guarantees ONLY that you will be compensated for such seizures, NOT that such seizures will not occur and NOT that such seizures must be purely for non-private benefit. The Supreme Court has no business deciding ANYTHING but the constitutional question and that is precisely what was done. Having read the opinion, they did an excellent job of determining that the local government had a well established justification with the public good in mind and that the owners were being compensated ergo it was a constitutionally sound action--thus deferring any further judgment to the appropriate state and local bodies. What, precisely, is improper about that?
In that sense, these "liberal" judges were being extremely CONSERVATIVE. The so-called "conservatives" were wanting to run rough-shod over the constitution to leap-frog the federal government straight over the state into an issue appropriately handled by local government. THAT would be a "liberal" action in the usual pejorative sense of the term.
Some rich fucker kicks me out of my house, there's going to be blood spilled. Sorry, my get-along limits stop there.
Some rich fucker may take your house, my wife took mine with 1 lie.
Daily I read about courts and how they are unjust. Loosing constitutional rights. I've never had to deal with the courts, so I figured hire a good lawyer and things should be ok. Oh was I wrong.
2 weeks ago, I'm in the middle of a nasty divorce, my wife called me an abuser, no proof. I was kicked out of my house, ordered to pay for counseling for the children, have to go to eval for being an abuser, and she gets to go to battered women's counseling. She gets 1/2 my pay, and I pay for her lawyer.
We had people living with us who testified SHE was the abusive one in the relationship. I couldnt believe the male bias I encountered. Male != abuser. I was the one who filed for divorce!
So, here I am, a working professional, never did anything wrong in my life (well, download an mp3 or 2), and I'm at the mercy of the courts because "For the safety of the children" in the temporary hearings I'm now homeless. Broke from lawyers bills and now have to hire a criminal lawyer on top of it.
Courts are screwing people over left and right, and this is news? Family court doesn't even have normal oversights, its totally unregulated.
What's my recourse? Suffer daily or commit suicide. That's what the courts left me with. Suicide rate for divorced men is over 30%, divorce rate is over 50%, and yet, no regulation for fairness for men in family court, no recourse against false allegations.
I wish I had a constitution blanket, wrap me up and make me feel safe, but thats just lunacy. American men are no longer free, 1 day in court showed me that. Everything I worked for my entire life gone in a day.
God bless America, men need the miracles.
-Brook
http://www.justiceformen.com/
And what are you going to do when Walmart is the one taking your house? Shoot 100K share holders? Or more likely, the rent-a-cop, or the CEO corporate flunky? As long as you're making a blood sacrifice, that will even the books? Are you willing to destroy your family's economic survival to prove a point?
The answer not just "yes...it's HELL FUCKING YES! If I'm kicked out of my home and property because I'm too "poor" to afford my own investment, then I personally have nothing left to live for. Everyone has their own value on life, and this is mine. It's because of such actions how revolutions are started.
Life is not for the lazy.
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.
Labels mean nothing. Most people are blinded by partisan politics that they think George Bush is a conservative. He's certainly not liberal, but he definatly is not conservative.
If anything, he's a liar, power hungry oppurtunist that exploits our laws, and our military for personal wealth.
A typical rich man, not a typical conservative.
One of these days the rich real realize that it's the poor that go to war.... and the poor may just point the guns back at the rich.
Be careful to actually read the amendment in question before commenting. The relevant portion of the fifth amendment is:
"nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
Note that the framers did not use the ambiguous term "public good" but the term "public use" which is much more well defined. If they take away property, it must be for the use of the public as a whole and not for any small part of it. This ruling basically strikes those three words ("for public use") right off the paper.
Your entire comment is null and void because you didn't read the Fifth Amendment.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
My husband was arrested for abuse. But he had the audacity (and knowledge) to go into court and cry real tears as he claimed I was an alcoholic, neglected the children, and slept around. He said I made false charges of abuse against him when he tried to get me treatment.
All the judge had to do was read the police report to see he was lying. I didn't drink then, and I don't drink now. I was a hard working, devoted wife and mother. I arrived with a stack of documents and several witnesses willing to testify to those facts. But the judge waived me off, and my husband's lie against me resulted in much the same deal you experienced. Over my frantic objections the judge gave him our house, our business, all of our assets, custody of our children, and all of my personal possessions. I was told to "dry out" and she'd take another look at the case.
After 25 years of working 80 hour weeks (through pregnancies and nursing babies) and doing without so many things I wanted, in order to insure financial security for my family - I left that courtroom with $12 in my pocket, no job and nowhere to live. The ONLY thing I got that day was child support imputed based on the TOTAL income of our business - something that took me over a dozen years to build up. I could not make a fraction of that on my own.
The court appointed shrink took a look at my evidence and heard my witnesses. By the third appointment she wrote out a letter saying the court had made a terrible mistake... but by the time I got another hearing TWO YEARS LATER the kids had been seriously abused and everything I owned was gone. He sold it all off and hid the cash. NOTHING was left but a bunch of dysfunctional, angry teenagers.
I know EXACTLY how you feel, but please, don't think its just MEN. I'm very much female. Our courts SUCK. There's no other word for it. Judges are political hacks that make fast, uninformed decisions based more on prejudice than evidence. Go sit outside family court one day and look at all the people crying, their lives devistated by one stroke of the gavel. They aren't all male.
Needless to say, the little guy loses to the commercial developer this case...
We didn't lose to the commercial developer, we lost to the fucking government! Maybe if we hadn't spent so much time worrying about Evil Business, we might have noticed that our government was reaching critical mass.
Business isn't the problem. Business don't have the power of eminent domain. Business don't have police and armies. And most of all, businesses don't have court systems arbitrarily deciding to take away the unalienable and natural rights you were born with. Only government does that.
Business didn't do this, the fucking government did this. And it wasn't the federal government that started it either, but some pissant little city council with too much time on their hands. For all your bitching about Bush or Kerry you never noticed that all the real tyrants in the US are your neighbors on the city council.
Yes, there are many businesses that lobby and court the government. But don't blame the addict, blame the pusher. Political power wouldn't be for sale if the government didn't put it up for auction to the highest bidder.
We're screwed now. This is a SCOTUS ruling. There's no one we can appeal this do. The only option we have to get our rights and property back is another revolution. The problem is that no one else but me cares. As long as the stop the Home Depot from building on the empty lot down the street, you guys will let the local government do whatever the fuck they want.
Emigrating to Iraq or Afghanistan is starting to look better and better. At least they have a future.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!