Supreme Court to Homeowners: Drop Dead

The recent Supreme Court ruling allowing local governments to force homeowners to make way for private developers has been met with widespread outrage, as well it should. The court's four liberals (Souter, Breyer, Ginsburg, and Stevens, and joined by the feckless Kennedy) so broadly defined the "public use" clause of the Fifth Amendment as to render it essentially meaningless. The effects of this decision will reverberate for years to come, as governments desperate for tax revenues collude with big development firms to steal private property. Time was when such sweeping power was strictly limited by a little thing called the Constitution. That time has now passed, thanks to an out-of-control, unaccountable bloc of liberals on the Supreme Court.

The loser in all of this is, of course, the individual homeowner, who cannot possibly wield the legal and political resources necessary to combat the combined might of government and big business. Once again, liberal statists on the court have shown that when private property rights conflict with government's power to coerce, the government always takes precedence. This stands the founders' original intent of a limited government completely on its head. As Clarence Thomas noted in a scathing dissent, “Something has gone seriously awry with this Court’s interpretation of the Constitution. Though citizens are safe from the government in their homes, the homes themselves are not.”

There are many paths to tyranny, but to undermine the sovereignty of private property for government purposes is surely one of the quickest.