Our
News Junkie linked to a long and carefully researched property rights article in American Thinker. It is an eloquent complaint about the Kelo decision where pursuant to Connecticut law private homes were taken through eminent domain for (private) redevelopment. We hear this line of complaint frequently and have two reservations about it. First, the United States has a long history of allowing private land to be taken and turned over or sold to for-profit corporations. If this could not have been done, there could never have been any railroads in the country that were not public agencies. Can the dear reader even imagine an economic development of the US interior by Conrail and Amtrak?
Second, and more important, is that the US Supreme Court in its Kelo decision merely decided to defer to state law. How many times do we conservatives complain when the Court overturns yet another state law for a newly discovered but unwritten federal “right”? If we in Connecticut do not like our eminent domain law which was passed by a majority of our state legislators and signed by our governor, we have a legislative solution and should not be rushing to Federal courts to ask that our legislature be overruled!
Just think about the number of times we have been furious that the Anointed Nine in Washington have overturned yet another long-standing state law for transgressing yet another unwritten right, and shout, write or (now) blog the words of the Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”
We have to confront a serious question: is our concern for states’ rights limited to state actions of which we approve? If so, we must then accept our hypocrisy and join the liberals in acknowledging that having an end result we like is more important than the legal niceties of getting there, and watch as the Age of the Rule of Law comes to an end.
Photo: Our recently-new Maggie's Farm contributor Kondratiev. We are fortunate to have such an eminent fellow on board. He meets our criteria, which are that he can shoot, write grammatically most of the time, and plow a straight furrow on our CT tobacco farm, with two cranky mules.
