If there were any lingering doubts in the minds of sensible people that the Supreme Court needs a major ideological makeover the Kelo v. New London case decided today should remove them. Throwing the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution in the trash can, five liberals decided that a municipal government can simply compel homeowners to relinquish their homes and property to authorities who may then award it to other private citizens, such as, for example, corporate businesses.
In other words, if a consortium wants to build a shopping mall on land you currently own, your land can be taken from you and given to the consortium. If a corporation wishes to build an office building where your church now stands they can simply convince the local government to seize the church and sell it to the corporate deep pockets.
Governments have always had the right to exercise eminent domain, of course, but under that principle the seizure of the property had to be for a public purpose. The Supreme Court has now said that wealthy corporations can take ownership of your property if they can persuade the local commissioners that it's in their economic interest to do so.
Voting in favor of this assault on personal property rights were all the usual suspects: John Paul Stevens, who wrote the majority opinion, such as it was, as well as Anthony Kennedy, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.
Sandra Day O'Connor wrote a rebuke of the intellectual and constitutional flimsiness of the majority's reasoning, and was joined in her opinion by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, as well as Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
We need more Justices like the latter and fewer like the former.
