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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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All your homes are belong to us.
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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!?
Now I can finally plow down my two neighbors houses and install my cluster!!!!
This runs so counter to the concept of using eminent domain for the public good that I could scream. I guess there's not much chance Congress would consider limiting eminent domain to the more 'traditional' uses like roads, schools, etc. Sigh.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
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
it was a 5-4 decision, which the conclusion being that the supreme court doesn't feel it's their job the decide what falls within the "public good" clause of eminent domain.
They stated that this doesn't nothing to prevent states from legislating limits on eminent domain seizures by municipal government
Inconceivable!
In Soviet America, private property seizes local government.
This is really a sad day.
I've posted other comments here about this, but here's the basic review:
The city government claims they seized the property for economic development, as part of a larger plan. Sure, the property is going to be turned over to a commercial developer, but it's "public use" of the land because of the larger economic development plan.
The state courts: Well, the city says their main reason for doing it is public use, not to benefit Pfizer, so it must be public use!
The supreme courts: We'll let the state courts worry about this. They said it's public use, so it probably is. Therefore, it's OK for the city to seize the land.
This is not the building of new roads, this is not the elimination of blight, this is a real estate development deal, and people are losing their houses over it. Does this frighten anybody but me?
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
Funny enough, the dissenting judges appear to mostly be conservative in nature from what I've read of their rulings.
And in an ironic twist, David Souter _is_ a Bush-appointed judge - Bush the elder, that is.
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
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.
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.
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
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.
Let's see:
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.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Un-freaking-believable.
The minority opinion of today's decision is pretty much the group I normally harbor such incredible contempt. And YET, today it is so obvious they were the ones making the correct decision. I am stroking out just trying to grasp this contradiction to my world view.
How do you go to a citizen, a property owner, someone who as poured his sweat and portion of his life into obtaining and maintaining his land, and then tell him he is to be evicted because some rich guy, or some soulless corporation has decided to take his property over???
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
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.
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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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.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
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!
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.
Strangely enough, this SCOTUS ruling could be a potential boon for local democracy and activism in the United States.
If indeed the ramifications are not "random", as Justice O'Connor put it (and I think she's right), then what we'll see are pitched local battles taking place across the entire nation, with commercial developers vs., well, the people. This may finally be the tipping point that wakes everyone up and sparks a vast new wave of civic activism. After all, the "local authorities" are democratically elected, and if they go off the deep end with seizing private property for pure commercial interests, it won't be long before people get out their pitchforks, so to speak.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
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.
In this instance, I have to agree with Rhenquist, Scalia, Thomas, and O'Conner.
Now I need to go take a shower.
. . . 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.
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.
"I was a conservative. Then they changed what `conservative' was. Now what I am isn't conservative, and what is `conservative' seems weird and scary to me. It'll happen to you!"
-- Ford
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
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.
If it's my house, my business, my whatever, it's mine. Not yours. Not New London's. Not whomever else's. I worked for it. Mine. It's utterly irrelevant how much you're prepared to pay for it if I don't want to sell. It is black and white.
You want to build something else? Fine. Go take over the city council's properties. Leave mine alone. This is theft, pure and simple. There;'s precious little difference between this and Cuba's "nationalization" of property after the revolution.
You wait and see. There will now be a LOT of cases where governments decide to "streamline" the process of changing their cities, counties, states, or whatever just to please whoever's in charge, or the local big business they want to buddy up to.
It won't usually involve $17M/acre. It will be backed up with guns if necessary. And it could just as easily be you as anyone else.
Based purely on this one ruling, those judges should be (at a minimum) in public stocks the rest of their lives. Preferably on a flatbed trailer so they can be toted around the country for everyone to laugh at, maybe throw a few tomatoes. I wouldn't have a problem with flogging, either.
But while we're at it, throw in the New London governmental morons who started this.
But Kennedy was only nominated because Bork was Borked, so Reagan had to pick someone more moderate. Same basic thing with Souter (not a specific Borking, but the fear of it).
I find your use of the term "Borked" to be offensive. Do you have any idea of who Bork even was? Time for a history lesson:
In 1973, Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox was demanding tapes and Presidential documents related to the Watergate break-in. Rather than turn over the evidence, President Nixon directed Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson resigned his position rather than fire the Special Prosecutor. Nixon then ordered Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox. Ruckelshaus refused and Nixon fired Ruckelshaus.
Finally, Nixon turned to then Solicitor General Robert Bork, who by law became the acting Attorney General when the Attorney General and deputy attorney general were absent. Bork carried out Nixon's order to fire Cox. After Bork fired Cox, Nixon abolished the office of the Special Prosecutor and had FBI agents quickly seal off the offices of Richardson and Ruckelshaus in the Justice Department and at Cox's headquarters in an office building in Washington, D.C.
So stop painting Bork as a victim of dirty tricks by mean liberals. He was an evil bastard who acted in concert with Nixon to thwart a legal investigation into Watergate. He lacked the ethics, judgment, and integrity to serve as dog catcher, much less as a Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States.
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.
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.
Ford cannot credibly be described as a conservative.
It depends on how you define "conservative" as the meaning is changing, has changed from previous definitions. The same with "liberal". Thomas Jefferson's and Thomas Paine's "Liberal" was someone who believed in a small and limited government, but today it's closer to socialism or big government. Meanwhile conservative back then believed in a big and powerful federal government. Conservatives are still for big government, the only difference between conservatives and liberals today is in what part of government is big. The only political party today with the classical liberal outlook of a small and limited government is the Libertarian Party.
FalconShould there be a Law?
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!
It's already happened. One millionaire was killed by police during a 'drug raid'. Turned out they were trying to seize his land through the drug seizure laws because the sheriff wanted it...
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.
I don't read AC A human right
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.
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
When I was 8 years old after a long legal battle the CT state department of transportation eminent domained my Family's land and many of our neighbors. They wanted to build a highway that didn't need to be built and for which they had been expressly told by the department of environmental protection that they could never have the permits to build. Among other things we had a river in our back yard, 90% of the land was considered wetlands, and the property abutted Nathan Hale State Forest ( I'll point out some of the land for which was sold to the state at a deep discount by my grandfather who was/is an avid conservationist) My parents were given $180,000 for a house that was appraised at $280,000. Beyond the value of the property my entire extended family lived right in the same area (grandfather was a farmer who gave his land to his children) My aunt and her family lived across the street, and my uncle and his family lived next door. Needless to say my family was scattered after they took their houses too. Today more than 17 years later the highway was never built and the house which my father built with his own hands on land his father gave him sits abandoned. I hope the people in New London stand their ground against the bulldozers. And when the first officer comes to physically remove them from their land I'll be crying tears of joy if they blow his head off with a shotgun.