"Those comments," he wrote, "were predicated on certain facts that we did not know (and could not have known) at the time of our decision and of which I was not fully aware until your talk — namely, that the city's development plan had never materialized and, as a result, years later, the land at issue remains barren and wholly undeveloped." He later added that he could not know of those facts "because they were not yet in existence."
This is exactly what was wrong with the Kelo decision.
The Justice says "he could not know of those facts 'because they were not yet in existence.'" I would argue that those weren't "facts," they were speculation, precisely because they hadn't occured yet.
What the justices did with Kelo was take a certainty in the property taxes owed by current property owners and trade it for the speculation of future higher property taxes promised by new property owners, and then call this a "public good" as a subset of "public use," the actual phrase from the Fifth Amendment.
The Justices might as well have rolled the dice and call it Constitutional.
-PJ
The Palmer comment is like spitting into the wind.
Instead of using a crystal ball, in the case, maybe, just maybe if they followed the Constitution, Kelo and her neighbors wouldn’t have been so screwed.