“Will the Kelo decision finally sink Trump?”
No, because the Kelo decision was made by the Supreme Court, not Trump, and eminent domain is in the Constitution.
You would think that Trump had called for the importation/legalization of million of foreigners and handing the country over to them.
This is from a media that does back flips trying to disconnect Hillary Clinton from her provable crimes, not just some statement she may have made.
That is horse doo doo...
What is in the constitution is that Government is restricted from seizing property from citizens without due process. This clause was put in the document because of the fears that the military could and had seized home and property for any number of reasons during the revolutionary war. Governement also had no reverence for private property in England. (it still does not)
Eminent domain IMO, is a resulting court bastardization of that clause and as such needs to be looked at closely and perhaps set aside as bad law.
The taking of private property for a public purpose is in the Constitution, and for a good reason.
There are times when land - not just any land - but specific land - is required for the construction of a road, a bridge, a naval yard, a courthouse, a canal, a dam, and so on. Those are pubic purposes.
The construction of an apartment building, a mall, or a casino by a private entity is NOT a public purpose. The government didn’t even have the temerity to claim such in Kelo.
Instead, the government took a broader position: that taking the property from its owners and giving it to new owners would increase the tax rake-off, and THAT is a public purpose. And the Supreme Court agreed.
With such a broadly defined basis for claiming public purpose, there would be absolutely no bar to your county government taking you house and land at a song and deeding it to someone else - anyone else - just as long as they planned to build a bigger, more expensive house.
Trump’s advocacy of this is an endorsement of tyranny. Sorry, but this is one of my long-held reservations about the man.