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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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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
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
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
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
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
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??
"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?
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.
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!