The Road to Constitutional Perdition, part 975,564

Cogent thoughts on Kelo from In the Agora:

The End of Constitutional Limitations?

The notion of limited government took another enormous body blow today with the Supreme Court’s astonishingly wrongheaded decision in the Kelo case (see the text of the decision here). It was 5-4, with the 4 most conservative justices – Rehnquist, Scalia, O’Connor and Thomas – dissenting. There is grand irony here. Despite the common perception that liberals are for the “little guy” and conservatives are for “big business”, the liberal judges on the court just upheld the government’s power to take away someone’s property and give it to private development companies solely because the private developers will use it in ways that will boost the tax base, while the conservatives on the court offered a blistering and absolutely accurate dissent. What this means, essentially, is that you don’t really own your home and property. You only own it until someone else can convince the government that they can put it to better use, at which point they can take it from you and give it to someone else. It’s difficult to imagine a more flagrant violation of our founding principles than that.

Is it overstating it to say that the entire experiment in limited government that we began 216 years ago with the passage of the Constitution may well have come to an end in the last few weeks with the double whammy of the Raich and Kelo decisions? If “interstate commerce” can be abstracted to give the government authority over activities that are neither interstate nor commerce, and if “public use” can be abstracted to cover private use, I dare say we have passed through Alice’s mirror into a Wonderland where words can mean whatever the Queen wants them to mean at any given time.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 23rd, 2005 at 10:48 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.