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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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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
Let's lay the blame where it belongs. Sure the businesses are acting in self interest, but it's the government acting like thugs.
-Peter
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.
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.
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.
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.
. . . 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
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??
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.
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!