"Many are already stating that the decision in Kelo renders the contract null and void."
It may be that some are going to end up in the dirt.....a possibility that is by no means satisfying to the sane. The extreme suggests that the Constitution is no longer a valid contract. That could portend a disaster. The less extreme view would suggest that the Court has seriously eroded what little respect for the law still existed prior to the Gang of Five taking it upon themselves to rewrite the Constitution in their own biased image. Over time, this erosion could take us to the same place - anarchy, chaos, and the end of the Republic - to be replaced by?
I would suggest that any document whose meaning was to be determined at a later date by 9 lifetime political appointees was never a contract in the first place.
Was the majority in Kelo basically the same Justices who voted in Lawrence to overturn recent precedent and affirmatively sanction sodomy as the moral equivalent of normality?
The Constitution hasn't been valid since at least 1861, so what is the big deal?
We'll probably all be speaking Chinese.
Carolyn
The most analagous situation of which I'm aware was the Finnish Civil War of the early XX Century, fought to prevent a national takeover by the Finnish Communists. Casualty figures and details *here.*But a figure of circa 100,000 casualties out of a prewar population of 3 million, during a 4-month fighting period [and the cleanup retribution aftermath] offers a close approximation. Entire pro-Red villages disappeared, erased from the countryside.
The extreme suggests that the Constitution is no longer a valid contract. That could portend a disaster.
Once the contract guarantees of the First, Second or Fourth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution are abrogated, suspended or otherwise broken, it is not just those portions that become moot but the entire document. And if those constitutional abrogators will not recognize my rights under the First Amendment, or the Second, there's no particular reason for me to accept that they have any authority derived under Article 1, or Article 2.
It looks like the best hope would be a more-or-less peaceful seperation of states as per the Soviet Union circa 1991. But I suspect that such an effortis doomed to degrade into a more brutal repetition of the 1861-1865 conflict, though of longer duration and withmuch greater casualty numbers. There'd be no expectation of honourable tratment of prisoners by either side in such an affray and eventual near-total warfare could be expected, as per the Finnish example.