Dispatches From the Culture Wars says this about the Supreme Court's egregious Kelo decision:
The notion of limited government took another enormous body blow today with the Supreme Court's astonishingly wrongheaded decision in the Kelo case. It was 5-4, with the 4 most conservative justices - Rehnquist, Scalia, O'Connor and Thomas - dissenting. There is grand irony here. Despite the common perception that liberals are for the "little guy" and conservatives are for "big business", the liberal judges on the court just upheld the government's power to take away someone's property and give it to private development companies solely because the private developers will use it in ways that will boost the tax base, while the conservatives on the court offered a blistering and absolutely accurate dissent. What this means, essentially, is that you don't really own your home and property. You only own it until someone else can convince the government that they can put it to better use, at which point they can take it from you and give it to someone else. It's difficult to imagine a more flagrant violation of our founding principles than that.
Is it overstating it to say that the entire experiment in limited government that we began 216 years ago with the passage of the Constitution may well have come to an end in the last few weeks with the double whammy of the Raich and Kelo decisions? If "interstate commerce" can be abstracted to give the government authority over activities that are neither interstate nor commerce, and if "public use" can be abstracted to cover private use, I dare say we have passed through Alice's mirror into a Wonderland where words can mean whatever the Queen wants them to mean at any given time.
Our Constitution is being progressively dismantled by the highest court in the land. The only realistic hope to salvage it is to get a couple or three more jurists on the court who believe that their mission is to discern what the framers intended when they wrote that document and rule accordingly.
We've had forty years of Justices who simply fly by the seat of their judicial pants, and they must now be put into the minority. Creating a conservative court is the main domestic reason many people voted for George Bush over Al Gore and John Kerry, and if the Republican party fails in this task, it will take at least a generation to recover from the disaffection it'll provoke among its rank and file.
