Um, I went through this with Conoco Philips, guess what, they were misusing the criteria of eminent domain to get what they wanted for nothing. It was a private corporation not a public utility. Just because liberal courts have been doing this doesn't mean it's right. I'm not panicked, I'm thoroughly PISSED OFF.
I'm dealing with another multibillion dollar corporation trying to pull the same damn thing of bypassing negotiations by running to the courts to take my property well below the fair market value. Why should they receive special considerations from the courts to trample over the owners of property they want? The way a property is used most definitely determines the value. I own a very valuable piece of property and should not be threatened with this crap every time the multibillion dollar corporations want to renegotiate the lease.
In the old days when they came to negotiate with my grandfather, they were above board and decent, it's not that way any more. It's cut throat, underhanded and threatening. It's my damn property, not theirs. I should have some say in how things go down correct? Where do we go for redress? Where do you go if it's your property they want?
"I'm dealing with another multibillion dollar corporation trying to pull the same damn thing of bypassing negotiations by running to the courts to take my property well below the fair market value. Why should they receive special considerations from the courts to trample over the owners of property they want?"
Why?
It is a good question.
Because the American system is structured to give the US courts the final decision on all issues, that is why.
The problem in the United States - and this has been seen since slavery, racial segregation, political protest limits, confiscations, abortion, gay marriage, taxation for schools, and now this decision on the taking of one man's land to give to a wealthier man - is the system set up by the US Constitution itself. The final source of power and decision in America is a court, in every single case, without exception. There is no exception to this rule.
In your US history, you have had President Lincoln, who used the occasion of the Civil War to establish a Presidential override of the Supreme Court, but this policy did not survive him.
So, in the United States, the final source of power is a court.
Contrast this with France, or all other Western European governments with a Parliament.
There must always be one final arbiter of everything, who cannot be overturned and overruled. We all know this.
Who shall that be?
The American Constitutional system has decided that it will be judges, appointed for life and immune from politics.
The French Constitutional system has decided that it will be Parliament, elected by the people, removable by the people in regular elections.
Thus, courts in America are the ultimate arm of political control.
Courts in France have no power to review the law at all. No court in France, not even the constitutional court, has any power whatsoever to strike down an existing law of Parliament. The Constitutional Court can find a law to be unconstitutional before it is passed, and so advise Parliament, the President and the people. But if Parliament passes the law anyway, then that is the law, and every judge in the land shall enforce that law, because the judge is nothing but the mouth who pronounces the words of the law, and the law is established solely and exclusively by the Parliament, elected by and answerable to the people.
In America, the Supreme Court holds supreme and final power.
In France, the Parliament holds supreme and final power.
It is unsurprising, therefore, that there is much greater political anger in America at the laws themselves than there is in France or other Parliamentary countries in Europe. In France the law may be bad, but it most certainly does represent the will of the majority of the People.
In America, the most important laws are NEVER decided by the people, nor by the US Congress. They are all decided by the Supreme Court, and the will of the people in America cannot override the Supreme Court, nor remove them from power.
The American Constitution is DESIGNED this way, or at any rate that is how it has been practiced in the US since 1800.
French law is often stupid. The 35 hour work week, for example. But if that proves intolerable and unpopular, it will be voted out as quickly as it came in. By contrast, no law ever becomes law that the people massively oppose. Parliament is answerable to the People, and bad laws cause changes of power in Parliament and the end of the politicians who passed them, along with the end of the bad laws.
The bad laws in America - and there are so many laws that the majority of Americans seem to be angry about all the time - are all made by the Supreme Court. Which cannot be overridden nor answered.
The sum total of this is a trememdous political anger and frustration in America which does not have a parallel in France or Britain.
People are always grousing about something everywhere, but in the US the law seems to be considerably different from what the Americans would have the law be if they were the final deciders of the law through their Congress.
They are not.
In America, the Constitution makes the Supreme Court the most powerful institution in the land. Many Americans seem to not like the results, but they seem to do nothing to change the Constitutional structure to eliminate that final authority from the Supreme Court and place it elsewhere.
A Frenchman would say that Congress ought to be the ultimate repository of power, but perhaps the Americans would prefer that the Presidency should be. (In France, in a true national emergency, Art. XVI of the Constitution allows the President of the Republic to assume plenary powers. Americans might prefer a Presidential system over a Parliamentary one.)
At any rate, today's ruling, and the discussion here, tells me two things:
(1) Americans are very unhappy, often, with the results of the constitutional structure, and
(2) Americans do not want to change their constitutional structure. They would prefer, rather, that the courts simply rule their way. Of course this hope is naive.
The only way the people can be sure to control the laws is by having the final power vested in a body they directly elect.
The American response is: "What about the tyranny of the majority?"
The answer to that is first that an elective republic with periodic parliamentary elections and two chambers of government limits the excesses of immediate popular passions.
The second answer is that final authority means tyranny can always appear somewhere, and the tyranny of the majority, expressed democratically through an elected Parliament which can be changed if the majority repents is preferable than a tyranny of an unelected and lifelong aristocracy, answerable to nobody and nothing.
In France, there could be a tyranny of the majority through Parliament. The 35 hour work week is the most egregious recent example.
In America, there is often tyranny of the ultimate authority through the Supreme Court. Today's ruling, or the abortion ruling, or the ruling that allowed for segregation to proceed: these are examples of that. More are forthcoming.
The only way to stop the sort of thing that happened today is to change the fundamental constitution of the United States and vest the final power of decision elsewhere, preferably in Congress. Under the present US Constitution, all power is finally vested in the courts. This has never worked all that well in America, and it manifestly does not work now, judging by how unhappy Americans are with their laws all the time.
But to change the constitutional structure is to touch something sacred in the American mind. This is unlikely.
Instead, there will almost certainly be more vain hopes that, somehow, the right collection of Archons can be placed in supreme authority, on the Federal Bench, and that they will use their power the way the people want.
It has never happened that way.
And when one contemplates the vain hope that it will, one can only think of Einstein's dictum that insanity is repeating the same experiment over and over hoping for different results.