Posted on 10/06/2015 5:48:12 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Even though it's a stance not especially popular with some Republicans, Donald Trump continued to support eminent domain in an interview on Tuesday, calling it "a wonderful thing" that has unfairly received a bad rap.
Trump, a billionaire known for his major real estate development projects, described eminent domain as a useful tool that local governments can use to prevent greedy homeowners from derailing major projects that could create thousands of jobs or provide a public good. Trump said that some conservatives don't fully understand how eminent domain works and don't realize that homeowners are usually paid "four, five, six, ten times" what their property is actually worth.
"Eminent domain, when it comes to jobs, roads, the public good, I think it's a wonderful thing," Trump said during an interview with Fox News's Bret Baier that aired Tuesday evening. "And remember, you're not taking property… you're paying a fortune for that property."
Trump's support of eminent domain, along with his use of the practice professionally, has prompted some criticism from conservatives.Republican presidential rival Rand Paul has slammed Trump over his eminent domain views, calling the mogul “a big fan” of the practice who has “shown no consideration for small private property owners."
The super PAC for the Club for Growth, a fiscally conservative advocacy group, recently aired television advertisements in Iowa that accuse Trump of supporting "eminent domain abuse" that would allow him to "make millions while we lose our property rights." Trump said the Club for Growth's attacks have come only because he refused to donate $1 million to their cause. He added that the spots are "not right" and do not accurately explain eminent domain.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
OK if Kelo opened the door to governments coming up with “whatever they want”, what are some of the more egregious examples of completely arbitrary and capricious ways in which they’ve done so?
“Just because it was done doesn’t make it right or constitutional.”
That’s insane. If something was clearly understood by the Founders to be constitutional, and found by every Supreme Court to be constitutional from then until now, of course it’s constitutional. It may not be “right” but I thought the “conservative” position was if people don’t think the Constitution as originally written is “right” about something, the response is not to have judges redefine it willy-nilly, but to pass a constitutional amendment about it.
Railroads are not the exception that proves the rule. The Supreme Court has never imposed limits on how governmental entities can define public use for purposes of the Fifth Amendment.
Fail
Trumpite Response:
A)Who cares?
B)He’s right
C)(ignores stance and attacks the media for reporting it)
Fail and fail and fail
This is one of the great ironies:
Trump is the true conservative because he’s conservative on about 10% of the key issues.
All the other candidates are turncoats, RINO’s, GOPe (and worse) because they are conservative on only about 90% of the issues.
When you point out the truth, the comeback is - tada! - No candidate is 100% perfect.
The idiocy is stunning and I’m not talking about the pea brains on FR. The idiocy extends to formerly staunch conservative advocates like Limbaugh and Levin.
No, this is completely incorrect. Look up the Incorporation Doctrine.
No locality can violate the Constitutional Rights of citizens in a manner contrary to the findings of the Supreme Court and the FedGov. Laws can certainly be different, but they cannot violate the roadmap laid out by the Constitution and the Federal Courts, so if the Court says "You can't ban handguns", then no locality can ban handguns, period. It doesn't matter if they want to define the 2nd Amendment differently, or define "arms" differently and say it doesn't include handguns. They don't have that power.
Localities can differ on how they define public use...
Of course they can, because of Kelo there is now no limit on the Takings Clause, and localities and municipalities working in tandem with whatever private entities are lining their pockets can now define anything as a "public use". Anything.
If Kelo had been decided correctly however, and a public use was defined as actually being a public use, and not a public benefit or some other generality, then Pfizer and Donald Trump would not be able to take someone's house and build a pharmaceutical plant or a limo parking lot.
In other words, if Vera Coking's case had been decided post-Kelo, she would have lost.
As I lined out earlier, the only good thing to come from Kelo is that real conservatives in the state governments rushed post-Kelo to establish state prohibitions on eminent domain and state and local limits on the Takings Clause, because the decision was so heinous.
In the end, Trump’s support of eminent domain and any other questionable stances won’t matter one iota to the Trump fan base.
The point you’re missing is that it has never been otherwise with public use. The Supreme Court has always left it up to elected officials to define public use. It’s never been limited to lands that would end up being “open to the public” or however you want to define it. Eminent domain has always allowed for the lands to pass into private hands, if there was a public purpose for it to do so, such as railroads, pipelines, and utilities, and urban redevelopment areas, and on and on. They’ve never limited it to in the way you’re thinking that they should have. So you can argue that they should do so, but it would contrary to 230+ years of constitutional history dating back to the very Founding.
I'm not missing that point at all, as that was the exact argument of the leftists on the Court. And you're just as wrong as they are.
The two cases that were precedent here were are the Hawaii Housing Authority case and Berman v. Parker, which were entirely different cases in that Hawaii Housing Authority was more about breaking up a land trust that functioned as a cartel and pre-dated Hawaii's statehood, and the Berman case actually put down parameters that said that eminent domain could be used to curb urban blight, not that it was wide open to any interpretation whatsoever.
The argument of you and the leftists on on the Court only applies if you adhere to the philosophy of:
a.) unlimited government power
b.) the Bill of Rights (specifically the 5th) empowers state and local government and not individuals, by providing unlimited authority under the Takings Clause.
Again, the Kelo decision has been proven to have been argued on fraudulent grounds by the City, and decided fraudulently by Stevens. There never was any serious plan to develop the neighborhood that would have passed any objective or knowledgeable arbiter, and the condemnation of the homes in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood actually COST the city money because of the litigation and demolition. The project never went anywhere and never was going to; it became nothing more than a power struggle at the end between homeowners and the local politicians.
Stevens incorrectly cited 19th century cases that actually DID establish limits on Public Use, and he even admitted after the fact that he had made a mistake in his citations.
Why you're defending an established fraud of a case really baffles me. Is Trump really that important to you that you would actually reject the conservative vision of property rights and liberties just to elect one guy?
I’ve said from the start that I would’ve decided with the minority. I just don’t think it’s that big of a deal. Can you cite any examples post-Kelo where government abused it’s “unlimited” powers to define public use for purposes of eminent domain.
You are absolutely correct that from a policy standpoint, it was a stupid decision by the local government in question there. But it’s certainly not a conservative principle for the SCOTUS to opine as to whether local decision-makers are making stupid decisions or not.
The Institute for Justice specializes in this type of work, and they alone have successfully saved 16,000 homes and businesses from eminent domain abuse, largely using new state level protections that were instituted by conservatives in the wake of Kelo. They have extensive write ups of current cases as well as success stories, but homeowners are at the mercy of the strength of their state laws, some of which are good but some which are only cosmetic and don't actually protect homeowners. These people are having to rely on the states to protect their 5th Amendment rights which are in the conservative and limited government philosophy a Constitutional protection, not one dependent on state laws:
But it’s certainly not a conservative principle for the SCOTUS to opine as to whether local decision-makers are making stupid decisions or not.
Yeah, it most certainly is! If local governments are violating peoples' Constitutional rights it is the responsibility of ALL branches of the Federal Government to stop it. What doesn't help is not admitting that there's actually a problem, or pretending that a Supreme Court case was decided correctly, when according to all of the evidence was not. Eminent Domain Abuse protections cannot happen if people don't acknowledge there's a problem, and you and Trump are ignoring it, or potentially in Trump's case, he actually supports this type of abuse since he's engaged in it.
If you don’t understand the difference between protecting constitutional rights and preventing stupid decisions, then there’s not a lot else we can discuss. We would have to start there.
All very general, but doesn’t answer the question as to what specific “major horror stories” have resulted from Kelo. I follow this stuff pretty closely, and can think of none. The fact that states and localities responded to Kelo with protective legislation proves that Kelo was correctly decided: it’s up to the states and localities to decide for themselves how they want to define public use.
The Court had a responsibility to stop a municipality from wrongfully seizing someone's land for public use when it was clearly not public use. We know that the seizure was wrong after the fact because the development was never real. It was dodgy that Pfizer was ever going to follow through on the development, and the development plans were a joke. The Fort Trumbull neighborhood is now a vacant field that is home to nothing but feral raccoons.
In no way could this have been a 'correct' decision, either practically, philosophically or Constitutionally, since we know that Stevens justification for siding with the New London was his misunderstanding of prior Eminent Domain decisions.
I don't know how you're arriving at these erroneous conclusions, but now you've drifted into incoherence by saying that the state and localities legislative responses, which were defensive in nature, somehow confirmed the accuracy of the Court. It was a reactive response to an incorrect decision, not a confirmation of it. That's like saying that because we were able to develop the atomic bomb and by extension nuclear energy, that proves that bombing Pearl Harbor was the correct thing to do.
Your statement is also nonsensical since you earlier said that you would've sided with the minority on the Court, and then said the majority was correct. Your statements are incoherent nonsense.
So if violating someone’s constitutional rights is smart from the standpoint of public policy, then it would be OK? Of course not, so the fact that it was a stupid decision from a policy standpoint is clearly irrelevant. There was a public use. The city decision-makers found that they needed economic development and this particular parcel was key to their plans. Economic development has for over a century been recognized as a legitimate government function.
It isn't general at all, which shows you didn't even look at it. The IJ lists dozens of success stories out of the many thousands of cases they've handled, with specifics and news articles on the cases, as well as current projects and cases that they're working on that deal with Eminent Domain abuse.
If you don't think Eminent Domain Abuse is real, then you don't care, aren't paying attention, or are just equivocating for Trump.
The entire nature of the Kelo case is antithetical to a conservative's understand of liberty and the Constitution, so you must hail from somewhere else, where they like the views of Ginsberg, Breyer, Souter, and Stevens.
OK name the most egregious case? The case that symbolizes how Kelo is just the absolutely worst thing to happen to our beloved Republic in the last century at least.
No it hasn't, and this is why Stevens had to admit that he got the court cases wrong when he cited pre-Berman v. Parker decisions.
The previous cases that Stevens cited did not deal with the Takings Clause, but the Due Process Clause of 14th Amendment. So it has NOT been recognized for over a century, and Berman vs. Parker dealt with BLIGHT, not economic development.
Standing up for the Kelo decision now, knowing how the development turned out and what ended up with the property, is not a defense of economic development as a justification for takings, it's a defense of the promise of economic development as a justification for takings. Essentially the local government can do ANYTHING and call it economic development.
It is a ticket for unlimited government power in seizing property from citizens.
Why in the hell are you defending this?
Why are you on a conservative site?
Why do you support the government over the individual in the face of all evidence that the decision was wrong?
The worst place now seems to be New York state, maybe start here; it might cure you of the assumption that because you don't know about problems, they don't exist:
I’ll take that as you can’t even cite one, if the best you have is a report of a whole state, and everything that’s going on it.
OK, well cite me the case where the SCOTUS had deemed economic development not a legitimate public use.
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