I'm usually accustomed to hearing liberals say that under the Bush administation, the U.S. is edging closer and closer to Cuba or the old Soviet Union. Between the Patriot Act and the administration's brazen attempts to control the media (including public broadcasting), the legislative and executive branches of the U.S. government have been giving away a little bit more of America's "specialness" every year. Now it's the Supreme Court's turn to play, and their recent decisions are, in many ways, straight out of Havana (and riling complaintants on the other side.)
Topping the list of Supco outrages is the Kelo v. New London decision, allowing municipalities to seize the property of one private owner and hand it over to another private owner whom the city deems "better" for urban development. Judging by the outpouring of public outrage, the decision didn't fool anyone with its "banthe blight" sugary coating. Instead, most Americans -- ironically, particularly those on the right -- see it for what it was: at worst, a straight-ahead sop to big developers and the politicians they pay for, and at best, an example of trust in government run amok. So why is this an issue making so much more waves on the right than on the left?
One reason could be the kinds of private entities that often own huge tracts of undeveloped land in urban or near-urban settings. In many cases, those owners include churches. In South Florida, large denomination churches in some cities own acres of land around their main buildings. With devlopable land quickly drying up in the U.S. housing boom, those lands are becoming more and more attractive and valuable to developers, who need only throw together a Community Redevelopment Agency, slap a minority or two on the board, grease up a few local pols, and it's IKEA, here we come!
Think about it: the suburbs are all-but built out. The next place developers are going, particularly here in South Florida, is downtown. And who owns large tracts of property downtown? Owners of Section 8 housing and apartments, retail holdouts who haven't hit the highway, and churches. They, far more than individual homeowners, are going to be the ones who find themselves in the path of oncoming "urban renewal."
That reality wasn't lost on the dissenters on the Court, including even Clarence Thomas, who for the first time I can recall, showed a modicum of interest in the history and fate of people like him. From Thomas' dissent:
Allowing the government to take property solely for public purposes is bad enough, but extending the concept of public purpose to encompass any economically beneficial goal guarantees that these losses will fall disproportionately on poor communities. Those communities are not only systematically less likely to put their lands to the highest and best social use, but are also the least politically powerful. If ever there were justification for intrusive judicial review of constitutional provisions that protect "discrete and insular minorities," United States v. Carolene Products Co., 304 U. S. 144, 152, n. 4 (1938), surely that principle would apply with great force to the powerless groups and individuals the Public Use Clause protects. The deferential standard this Court has adopted for the Public Use Clause is therefore deeply perverse. It encourages "those citizens with dis-proportionate influence and power in the political pro-cess, including large corporations and developmentfirms" to victimize the weak.
Those incentives have made the legacy of this Court's "public purpose" test an unhappy one. In the 1950's, no doubt emboldened in part by the expansive understanding of "public use" this Court adopted in Berman, cities "rushed to draw plans" for downtown development. B. Frieden & L. Sagalayn, Downtown, Inc. How America Rebuilds Cities 17 (1989). "Of all the families displaced by urban renewal from 1949 through 1963, 63 percent of those whose race was known were nonwhite, and of these families, 56 percent of nonwhites and 38 percent of whites had incomes low enough to qualify for public housing, which, however, was seldom available to them." Id., at 28. Public works projects in the 1950's and 1960's destroyed predominantly minority communities in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Baltimore, Maryland. Id., at 28-29. In 1981, urban planners in Detroit, Michigan, uprooted the largely "lower-income and elderly" Poletown neighborhood for the benefit of the General Motors Corporation. J. Wylie, Poletown: Community Betrayed 58 (1989). Urban renewal projects have long been associated with the displacement of blacks; "[i]n cities across the country, urban renewal came to be known as 'Negro removal.' " Pritchett, The "Public Menace" of Blight: Urban Renewal and the Private Uses of Eminent Domain, 21 Yale L. & Pol'y Rev. 1, 47 (2003). Over 97 percent of the individuals forcibly removed from their homes by the "slum-clearance" project upheld by this Court in Berman were black. 348 U. S., at 30. Regrettably, the predictable consequence of the Court's decision will be to exacerbate these effects.
Of course, this is the same Clarence Thomas who delivered the Court's opinion yesterday, finding that big, monopolist cable companies "with disproportionate influence and power" should be able to force you to use their broadband services, withholding their underground lines and preventing competition that could benefit comparatively "weak" consumers... and who's for every intrusive act of the federal government and who seems incapable of perceiving racial bias in jury selection even when it's slamming him over the head ...
<%
dim done
done = request.form("done")
if done = "" then
done = "No"
%>
Tell a friend
<%
Else
if request.form("done") = "Yes" then
'sets variables
dim email, sendmail
email = request.form("email")
Set sendmail = Server.CreateObject("CDONTS.NewMail")
'put the webmaster address here
sendmail.From = "webmaster@aspbasics.com"
'The mail is sent to the address entered in the previous page.
sendmail.To = email
'Enter the subject of your mail here
sendmail.Subject = "Check out this website"
'send a specific page or send a site url
dim url
'url = Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_REFERER")
url = "http://www.aspbasics.net"
'This is the content of the message.
sendmail.Body = "Site recommendation from a friend!" & _
vbCrlf & vbCrlf & "A friend has sent you this email and thought you would should check out this site." & _
vbCrlf & url & vbCrlf
'this sets mail priority.... 0=low 1=normal 2=high
sendmail.Importance = 1
sendmail.Send 'Send the email!
response.redirect Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_REFERER")
'Response.write ("Sent to ") & email
End if
End if
%>
"[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, August, 1788
