Kelo: the real-world consequences of bad decisionsI believe I have already made my profound contempt for the Supreme Court's wrong decision in Kelo v. New London - the ruling in which the court effectively deleted the public use clause from the fifth amendment - entirely clear. See, e.g., Kelo: May the Farce be With You, LJ, 6/28/05.
While the court's ruling, its flagrantly unconstitutional judicial activism, and its pernicious place in constitutional doctrine (it has become an instant clanger, decried by almost every side), have been extensively covered, the real-world results have not surfaced. However, now they have done so, and it's not pretty: [N]ow New London is claiming that the affected homeowners were living on city land for the duration of the lawsuit and owe back rent. It's a new definition of chutzpah: Confiscate land and charge back rent for the years the owners fought confiscation.
In some cases, their debt could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Moreover, the homeowners are being offered buyouts based on the market rate as it was in 2000...[Residents are being offered] the market rate as it was in 2000, as state law requires. That rate pales in comparison to what the units are now worth, owing largely to the relentless housing bubble that has yet to burst. Here's the absolute kicker:An NLDC estimate assessed Dery for $6,100 per month since the takeover, a debt of more than $300K. One of his neighbors, case namesake Susette Kelo, who owns a single-family house with her husband, learned she would owe in the ballpark of 57 grand. "I'd leave here broke," says Kelo. "I wouldn't have a home or any money to get one. I could probably get a large-size refrigerator box and live under the bridge." Remind me again how that "living constitution" can only ever grant us more, newer and shinier freedoms?
The defenders of Kelo argue that all that ruling does is grant discretion to the state legislatures; it is precisely and for no other reason the purpose of placing a limitation in the constitution to preclude. It seems to me that the founders placed limitations on government because they didn't trust governments. They limited emminent domain with the public use clause; the Kelo court - Justices Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer - eliminated that protection, and as the report quoted above showed, immediately having been loosed from that restraint, the New London government lived down in every way to the expectations of the framers.
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