Posted on 06/23/2015 8:23:08 AM PDT by fredericbastiat1
As of early 2015, almost ten years after the Supreme Court upheld the Kelo condemnations, the properties that were the focus of an epic legal battle remain empty and undeveloped. Several plans to redevelop these lots have fallen through. The only creatures making regular use of them in the intervening years have been a colony of feral cats.
These failures were not simply caused by adverse publicity resulting from the public backlash against the Supreme Court ruling or by the recession and financial crisis that began in 2008. As a 2005 New York Times article noted, the failure was a result of “contract disputes and financial uncertainty” and the unwillingness of investors to commit to a flawed project. As early as 2002, Pfizer had begun to lose interest in utilizing the new facilities expected to be built in the development area. In 2009, the firm announced plans to close down its New London facility and began to transfer the employees working there elsewhere. With Pfizer’s departure, the city lost 1,400 jobs that state officials had attracted to the area by committing to redevelop Fort Trumbull in a way that suited the firms’s needs.
The city has managed to successfully redevelop the portion of the Fort Trumbull land that was previously part of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center closed in 1995. It is now a leased research and development center. But that property already belonged to the city after the center had closed, and there was no need to use eminent domain to redevelop it.
(Excerpt) Read more at theblaze.com ...
SCOTUS are often wrong headed and have lost their moral authority. Eschew them.
Yesterday’s SCOTUS 8-1 ruling for Horne is a move in the right direction re: takings. Kelo may have been a factor behind the scenes.
Beware of the power of a government that erroneously believes it knows better than you what is best for you.
Any government that can take your property can take your life.
Filburn v Wickard (or vice versa) needs to be shot down, Big Time.
Those on the court should be removed and tried for fraud.
Part III was the usual, dangerous, 5-4.
The anti-Kelo activists who came close to taking David Souter’s house to turn it into a café may have made an impression on the other justices.
So, in the end, none are winners in the Kelo vs. New London case.
Fitting end for the greedy New London town planners.
I disagree.
SCOTUS decisions are for the most part, nothing more than justifications for government actions.
Look close at any decision against the government and you will find some underlying reason. Money or power or simply ruling to enrich friends of the court.
Courts are just another corrupt branch of a corrupt government.
But not fitting end for Breyer and Stevens.
It’s rare to obtain from a court more Justice than one is willing to pay to obtain.
Any government that can give you anything you want can take away everything you have - Ezra Taft Benson, Secretary of Agriculture to President Eisenhower.
For those who don't know the details, an Ohio farmer (Roscoe Filburn) grew "too much" grain according to the dictates of the feds and the "Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938". Roscoe responded that his grain did not cross state lines, and thus wasn't falling under the "in interstate commerce" clause of the Constitution, and therefore could not fall under Federal jurisdiction. (You see, this is back when the FedGov was actually limited and people paid attention to silly little things like the Tenth Amendment... This case is one of the ways that Pandora's Box got opened.) In fact, Roscoe wasn't even selling the excess grain... he was feeding it to his own livestock. It wasn't even leaving his property!!!
Unfortunately, the problem was FDR's lovely threat of "packing the Court" (in 1937) if they did not uphold his desires to be Emperor of America. (Since there is no stated limit to the number of Supreme Court Justices in the Constitution, his threat was to nominate 10 MORE Justices to add to the 9 life-timers on the Bench, and he would make sure that all ten were 100 percent under his control, so that every case would be decided his way, by at least a 10-9 vote. Aren't Democrats lovely?)
So, the Federal District Court sides with Roscoe, because they've actually read the Constitution before. Cowed SCOTUS overturns it, and upholds the Act under the Interstate Commerce Clause, saying that if Filburn had not used home-grown wheat, he would have had to buy wheat on the open market. This effect on interstate commerce may not be substantial from the actions of Filburn alone but, through the cumulative actions of thousands of other farmers, it COULD become substantial. Therefore Congress could regulate wholly intrastate, non-commercial activity if such activity, viewed in the aggregate, would have a substantial effect on interstate commerce, even if the individual effects are trivial... in other words, if ANY activity COULD somehow affect interstate commerce (like the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Africa), then the Feds could regulate it under the "interstate commerce clause".
And here we are, 70 years later, with the Feds in EVERY aspect of our lives. History lesson for today. :)
After Kelo, there was a rash of eminent domain seizures along the Florida Intracoastal Waterway. Homes on the water from the 1960s and 1970s were being condemned as blights because the families that inherited them from their parents and grandparents (who moved to South Florida back then) when't paying the property taxes that yacht clubs would bring.
The land was too good for the people who originally built there during the housing boom of the 1970s.
From 2005: Land-use battle rages in Florida.
-PJ
Eschew them and espit them out!
I wuz looking forward to a celebratory vacay in N.H.
The inevitable barren fruit of a crony capitalism that has no regard for basic right and wrong or the Constitution.
bfl
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