The Beginning of the End
Am I the only one who was absolutely aghast at what the Supreme Court did yesterday? This is an absolute OUTRAGE. Check out the CNN article here. As I understand it, the Supreme Court gave local governments the right to bulldoze your home and take/buy your property - not just for a highway or another "eminent domain" kind of thing... not just because the area is blighted... but because the rich developer friend of your local town council can make more money that way!
Think about it... this can be used, as it is in conneticut, to bulldoze entire neighborhoods to make way for a better development. Like your house downtown? So does that guy who wants to build a high-rise. You own an oceanfront house at the beach? Well, if a developer can make more money off of that property by building a hotel and the local council thinks it's a good idea, say bye-bye. This is outrageous. And it sounds like it was a 5-4 vote.
And speaking of the supreme court, I REALLY like justice O'Connor. She apparently wrote the dissent on this case. I hope this guy is wrong about her.
posted by chewie at 12:35 PM
6 Comments:
One more article on this today:
http://money.cnn.com/2005/06/23/news/fortune500/retail_eminentdomain/index.htm?cnn=yes
Thank God we can not have more Wal-marts!
2:31 PM
Glad to see I wasn't the only one ticked off by this.
11:21 PM
Well, the SC is composed of judges, not politicians (in theory, anyway). So it's neither Dem or Repub; however, the justices are appointed in a partisan way by the president. I was watching the Chris Mathews how on NBC this Sunday and they had a great discussion about the SC. One conclusion was that congress shifted more of the legislative responsibility to the court (ie: they shirked their responsibility) so now the SC justice fights are becoming (surprise!) more polarized. It's excpected that there will be a new justice appointed by Bush in the next year and it's going to be a tough battle and the repubs may use the nuclear option, etc. It's gonna be ugly.
What sucks is that past presidents usually bend to the public will when appointing judges. Both Bush Sr. and Clinton did so and chose more moderate judges; however, we all know dub-ya is going to be headstrong about the whole thing.
4:46 PM
What do you make of the fact that judges with traditionally liberal stances (Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer) oversaw the ruling, whilst traditionally moderate and/or conservative justices (O'Connor, Scalia, Thomas, Rehnquist) dissented? I'm not trying to start a political storm, but the implications of so-called "small government liberalism", in which SCOTUS essentially gave this particular power to local municipalities, has been shown to have its own drawbacks. This type of localized federalism is exactly what libertarians and centrists approve of, and here it is biting the individual in the butt!
2:25 PM
Ooops, forgot Stevens on the liberal side...
2:26 PM
That's an interesting observation. The conservatives have, traditionally, been the champions of individual rights and property rights. It's not a perfect system. I'd rather see less property rights because we don't live in a vacuum. (What you do on your property affects my property, etc. ) But as a centrist, I disagree that we want localized federalism. I want balance! So in this case, I want the government to have some reasonable power, but this outside of that line, imho.
You're right, tho... in this case, I would side with the conservatives and would rather err to the side of property rights.
4:04 PM
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