the smedley log - suburban scrawl

Eminent Domain

“Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms.”
-Sandra Day O’Connor

Philly Future notes the new edict from the Supremes that says it’s okay to take private property for private economic development (clarifying, in a very intriguing way, the meaning of “public use”).

Bob shares some thoughts on the ruling that I haven’t had time to dig into yet.

If you get a chance, look at the vote breakdown. The so-called leftists sided with the states rights and moneyed interests crowd. The so-called conservatives sided with the little guys. Go figure. Just another nail in the coffin for the idea that the terms “liberal” and “conservative” mean anything at all any more.

God help us all…

I was mindful of this, but I didn’t want to get too much into the politics without knowing more detail of the ruling (which may take me a while). That said, this is the way conservatives should behave, as I far as I can tell—not that they usually do anymore. That the more “liberal” jurists went with the moneyed interests is absolutely quite troubling.

I was dwelling on a local implication of eminent domain, wherein a woman up the road was being told by the local government that she had to sell her house for about half of what she had previously been offered. This instance didn’t relate to private enterprise, though; it was simply a case of the local/county “open space” program, and since the local gov had purchased property adjacent to her’s, they wanted to decrease ownership liability by making sure nobody lived too close to the government owned land.

I have, for the most part liked the thought of open space plans, but when they take it so far as to comandeer someone’s private land, that absolutely disturbs me to no end. That this ruling will make it easier to do the same just to benefit private business is even more disturbing.

When I first heard that this case was going to make it to the Supremes, I thought it had no chance of passing. The strict constructionalists on the bench were very wary of expaning the definition of “public purpose” even when deciding on the states right to use eminent domain to purchase blighted properties, a program that has been successful in areas like Baltimore. I wasn’t too surprised to see the Thomas/Scalia/Rehnquist block vote against, although the socially aware reasoning in both O’Connors and Thomas’s disent were more than I expected.

I was pretty sure that they would have been able to sway one vote, and based on reports O’Connor seemed to be pressuring many of the “liberal” judges, to no avail.

In the end, the Supremes once again went beyond the scope of the Constitution and further muddied what should be a relatively simple concept.