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Thanks for the ping, meadsjn. Petition eagerly signed.

I have been stewing, almost obsessively, over the Supreme Court’s decision for the past couple of days, and had to force myself to sit down this afternoon and write a few letters – not in the hope that they will make any kind of difference, but more in the hope that doing so might at least siphon off some of the rage that I am feeling.

I sent the following letter to the editors of several local, and a few distant metropolitan, newspapers today. I also sent abbreviated versions to Joe Pitts, our congressman, and senators Santorum and Specter. The latter was no doubt a waste of a 37-cent stamp, but I have learned to never preclude miracles.

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First, a disclaimer: I am not an attorney, and I have had no training whatsoever in the law. While some may believe that to be a disadvantage in forming an opinion regarding American laws, or the American judicial process, I believe it to be quite the opposite. We laymen have the distinct advantage of being able to look at modern American laws and modern American judicial rulings without having to concern ourselves with political pressures, ludicrous, irrational judicial precedents, absurd legal technicalities, or microscopic small print. In a brain free of such irrelevancies there still remains considerable room for common sense.

I believe the Supreme Court’s ruling in Kelo et al v. City of New London may well represent the most egregious Court ruling of my lifetime. I am a member of the baby boom generation, so my lifetime includes thousands of high court decisions. The only other rulings that even come close to the audacity of this one occurred with the infamous Roe vs. Wade decision in 1973 and the dismembering of the First Amendment when the Court upheld McCain-Feingold in 2003. I suppose the continued future ramifications of all three rulings will reveal which one is more noxious, and I don’t relish witnessing that particular decision making process.

Our Founders embraced, and sought to preserve for us, the economic definition of private property. They based their opinions on common law, and asserted that private property ownership rights existed before government. The only logical alternative to the economic definition is the collectivist definition, in which the state retains actual ownership, and may therefore both regulate and seize property at will.

The Court’s ruling in Kelo/New London affirms a collectivist view of property, which is blatantly unconstitutional.

Common law, upon which our Founders based much of their law/justice beliefs, has a three-pronged foundation: the law of contract, tort liability, and private property. Destroy one of those legs and the entire structure is at risk. English Whig intellectuals (most notably Locke, Gordon and Sydney) provided the common law basis upon which our Founders constructed their vision of American law. They renounced the 'divine right of kings' in deference to the belief that individual rights supercede, and regulate, the power of the state.

Our Founders believed that a government that claims more controls than those empowered to it by property owners is an illegitimate government. They also loathed the European class system and the inherent feudal mindset that it supported regarding land ownership. They believed that, by definition, the sanctity of private individual land ownership was among the two or three most crucial cornerstones of a republican form of government.

As a result, several of the amendments in the Bill of Rights are either directly or indirectly related to the absolute sanctity of individual private property rights.

Those that indirectly relate …

The Third Amendment (regarding soldiers being quartered in a house without the owner’s consent, or as prescribed by law) exhibits an unmistakable belief in the sanctity of a man’s home.

The Ninth Amendment states that ‘the enumerations of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.’

The Tenth Amendment reads, ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states and the people.’ The ‘powers’ to which our Founders alluded here clearly include private property rights as delineated under common law.

Those that directly relate …

The Fifth Amendment states that no American shall be ‘deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. Nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.’

Notice that our Founders were establishing firm parameters by which private property could be seized for public use (the shaky foundation from which the eminent domain monster was born). No doubt it didn’t even occur to them that a republican form of government would ever consider seizing private property for the over-riding purpose of increasing tax revenue, as in Kelo vs. New London.

Nor did it occur to them that government would seize private property in order to provide benefit to the wealthy or the politically connected by depriving the hard-working (yet grossly uninformed) masses of deserved, and earned, benefit.

The Public Use Clause has found itself distorted beyond recognition, and certainly beyond its providing any more value to a representative republic.

The portion of the Fifth Amendment that addresses private property rights is again reaffirmed in the Fourteenth Amendment.

In America 2005, the state’s desire to usurp power from the individual sometimes surpasses its ability to tax (at least to the degree that the citizens will rebel). So, when increased taxation is not an option, congress, with the co-operation of activist courts, decides instead to subvert the rights of private property owners. This covert method of increasing revenue (and consequently increasing power) has been rarely, if ever, more apparent than in Kelo vs. New London.

In America 2005, the Constitution’s reverence for the sanctity of private property rights has taken a back seat to the leftist belief that societal and environmental reforms must take precedence. Justice Thomas sorrowfully and sarcastically calls this left-leaning justification the ‘Diverse and Always Evolving Needs of Society’. The fact that leftists believe the Constitution to be a ‘living document’ has rarely been more painfully exhibited than in this week’s Supreme Court travesty.

Neither the Constitution, nor the rule of law, can long survive the scourge of legislative and judicial systems gone awry (only by Constitutional measure; not by collectivist theory). That menace, combined with a passive, uninformed citizenry, is a certain invitation to entrenched tyranny, from which there will be little or no opportunity to reclaim liberties that we have for so long taken for granted.

Legislatures making laws to benefit the government and business elite … and courts upholding such elitist laws … it doesn’t even remotely resemble the America our Founders established, or the America I want to call home. The fact that an American family can suffer the heartbreak and indignity of being forced out of their home by their government, because a land developer or a large corporation has declared that it has better use for the land, represents an enormous, unprecedented downward step in the failure of the American experiment in self-governance.

When I was studying World War II in high school I remember learning the definition of fascism. One of the glaring tenets included the idea that fascist governments may ‘allow’ individuals to ‘technically own’ property, but government makes most of the decisions regarding the use of that property. American bureaucratic zoning, environmental, anti-discrimination, and other regulations have already mirrored that integral aspect of fascism for decades.

Government passing legislation that dictates the use of private property is bad enough. Government passing legislation that enables it to seize private property under guidelines that reek of power-hunger and the realization of a socialist/collectivist agenda is prophetic. Barring a revolution, it predicts the demise of the most moral, and most prosperous individual-liberty-based civilization in the history of mankind.

~ joanie