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Today is Kelo Day. We have contemporaneous columns from three of our favorites Mark Steyn takes us back with his July 3rd, 2005 column for the Chicago Sun-Times.
… A couple of days beforehand, the majesty of the law turned its attention to “eminent domain” — the fancy term for what happens when the government seizes the property of the private citizen. It pays you, of course, but that’s not much comfort if you’ve built your dream home on your favorite spot of land. Most laymen understand the “public interest” dimension as, oh, they’re putting in the new Interstate and they don’t want to make a huge detour because one cranky old coot refuses to sell his ramshackle dairy farm. But the Supreme Court’s decision took a far more expansive view: that local governments could compel you to sell your property if a developer had a proposal that would generate greater tax revenue. In other words, the “public interest” boils down to whether or not the government gets more money to spend.
I can’t say that’s my definition. Indeed, the constitutional conflation of “public interest” with increased tax monies is deeply distressing to those of us who happen to think that letting governments access too much dough too easily leads them to create even more useless government programs that enfeeble the citizenry in deeply destructive ways. …
Next for Kelo Day, John Tierney’s NY Times column for July 5, 2005 on eminent domain abuse in Pittsburgh.
… Pittsburgh has been the great pioneer in eminent domain ever since its leaders razed 80 buildings in the 1950′s near the riverfront park downtown. They replaced a bustling business district with Gateway Center, an array of bland corporate towers surrounded by the sort of empty plazas that are now considered hopelessly retrograde by urban planners trying to create street life.
At the time, though, the towers and plazas seemed wonderfully modern. Viewed from across the river, the new skyline was a panoramic advertisement for the Pittsburgh Renaissance, which became a national model and inspired Pittsburgh’s leaders to go on finding better uses for private land, especially land occupied by blacks.
Bulldozers razed the Lower Hill District, the black neighborhood next to downtown that was famous for its jazz scene (and now famous mostly as a memory in August Wilson’s plays). The city built a domed arena that was supposed to be part of a cultural “acropolis,” but the rest of the project died. Today, having belatedly realized that downtown would benefit from people living nearby, the city is trying to entice them back to the Hill by building homes there.
In the 1960′s, the bulldozers moved into East Liberty, until then the busiest shopping district outside downtown. Some of the leading businessmen there wanted to upgrade the neighborhood, so hundreds of small businesses and thousands of people were moved to make room for upscale apartment buildings, parking lots, housing projects, roads and a pedestrian mall.
I was working there in a drugstore whose owners cursed the project, and at first I thought they were just behind the times. But their worst fears were confirmed. The shopping district was destroyed. The drugstore closed, along with the department stores, movie theaters, office buildings and most other businesses.
You’d think a fiasco like that would have humbled Pittsburgh’s planners, but they just went on. …
Debra Saunders had a good Kelo column too.
AMERICANS who want to keep government out of the bedroom, beware. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision that makes it too easy for the government to seize your bedroom — and kitchen, parlor and dining room — then hand your precious home over to a corporation.
The Fifth Amendment stipulates, “Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” Lawyers call it the Takings Clause.
In its decision, the Supreme Court expanded the concept of “public use” to apply it, not to a highway or school or railroad, but to economic development sanctioned by a government entity.
The city of New London, Conn., found itself in economic doldrums. Redevelopment was supposed to be the bromide. State and local officials created the New London Development Corporation. That unelected entity decided to increase tax revenues by pushing middle-class families out of their waterfront homes and using eminent domain — the other E.D. — to make way for a revitalization project, anchored around a Pfizer Inc. research facility.
Some families in the redevelopment area agreed to be bought out. Susette Kelo and Wilhelmina Dery, who was born in her home in 1918, were among those New Londoners who balked. The city didn’t contend there was any blight in the neighborhood to warrant government action. Why should they move out because Pfizer wanted in?
In a 5-4 ruling on Kelo written by Justice John Paul Stevens, the Big Bench answered the why question: Because the government says so. …
Gabriel Schoenfeld writes on the ways to defeat Iranian tunneling.
Israel has just carried out a major aerial exercise, putting a hundred or so F-15s and F-16s into the skies over the eastern Mediterranean, evidently a rehearsal for a strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. The move follows the statement earlier this month by Shaul Mofaz, Israel’s deputy prime minister, that an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear program is “unavoidable.” Israel almost certainly knows the location of some of the critical nodes in the Iranian program that it must hit if it is to set the Iranian effort back by several years. It also possesses the technology to assure that its bombs will fall close to or on their targets. But would such a strike succeed?
We cannot know the answer, and neither can the Israelis. The question calls attention to what might be called the ongoing Counterrevolution in Military Affairs.
The Revolution in Military Affairs was based upon silicon, in particular the computer chips that make for precision-guided weapons. In the 1980s, the United States developed the technology to drop munitions near enough to their targets to ensure a high chance of destruction. In World War II, the circular error probable–the radius of a circle into which a projectile will land at least 50 percent of the time–was more than half a mile. Today, thanks to GPS systems and laser- and infrared-guiding devices, the radius is less than two dozen feet. Almost any given target can be knocked out by the use of just one or two conventional bombs.
In the face of the threat of such efficient destruction, Iran has not stood still. …
Pickerhead got to vent last week on the GITMO decision with Ann Coulter. Now we have a couple of serious people. Richard Epstein, Chicago law prof who has graced these pages before, is first. He likes the decision.
LAST week’s Supreme Court decision in Boumediene v. Bush settled a key constitutional issue: all prisoners detained at Guantánamo Bay are constitutionally entitled to bring habeas corpus in federal court to challenge the legality of their detention.
This 5-4 decision was correct. The conservative justices in the minority were wrong to suggest that the decision constitutes reckless judicial intervention in military matters that the Constitution reserves exclusively for Congress and the president. (Disclosure: I joined in a friend-of-the-court brief filed on the plaintiff’s behalf.)
Yet Boumediene is rich in constitutional ironies. In addressing whether non-Americans detained outside the United States are entitled to habeas corpus, the court passed up an opportunity to clarify the law, and instead based its reasoning, flimsily, on a habeas corpus case that was decided just after World War II. This is too bad, because issues as important as habeas corpus should turn not on fancy intellectual footwork but on a candid appraisal of the relevant facts and legal principles. …
Stuart Taylor is next.
Our Constitution works best when its custodians–the president, Congress, and the judiciary–behave well. In the matter of suspected “enemy combatants,” all three have behaved badly. That’s why the Guantanamo Bay prison camp has been such a running sore. Even if Guantanamo ends up being closed, the human-rights and public-relations debacles that it symbolizes will continue until a new president and Congress take a grown-up approach to some extremely thorny problems.
Problems such as: What should we do with a Guantanamo detainee who, the best available evidence suggests, is probably a jihadist bent on mass murder but who cannot be convicted of any crime?
Don’t hold your breath waiting for a clear answer from the Supreme Court, which has asserted its supremacy in such matters–while raising more questions than it has resolved–in three cases, culminating in its big 5-4 ruling on June 12 that Guantanamo detainees have a right to broad federal judicial review of their petitions for release.
The Bush administration has perpetuated a global scandal since 2002 by stubbornly refusing to provide these detainees–who could be locked up for life–with a fair opportunity to prove that they are innocents seized and held by mistake. Bush and a few of his top political appointees imposed these policies over objections from many of the military lawyers and other professionals whose expertise ordinarily helps shape presidential decisions and helps entitle them to judicial deference. …
Ilya Somin in Volokh, posts a comparison of soccer to normal US team sports.
The conjunction of the Celtics-Lakers NBA Finals and the European Soccer Championship led me to reflect on two important advantages of US pro sports over international soccer: soccer often promotes nationalist and ethnic violence and provides propaganda fodder for repressive or corrupt governments, while US pro sports (with extremely rare exceptions) do not.
European and Latin American soccer rivalries are commonly linked to nationalistic and ethnic antagonisms (e.g. – England vs. Germany, England vs. Ireland, Germany vs. Poland, etc.). Even the fan bases of teams in internal national soccer leagues often break down along ethnic lines. This conjunction of sports rivalries and nationalistic/ethnic rivalries often leads to violence. The most notorious example is the 1969 “Soccer War” between El Salvador and Honduras – a conflict which might have been funny except for the fact that 2000 people were killed and tens of thousands displaced from their homes. And there are many lesser cases of riots and other violence resulting from soccer games.
Many European and especially Latin American soccer teams are also closely associated with governments. This often allows repressive and corrupt regimes to obtain propaganda benefits from the teams’ victories. …
John Podhoretz posts on a publisher who’s had enough of the NY Times Book Review.
The many-hatted Roger Kimball, who runs Encounter Books when he’s not running the New Criterion and writing art criticism and trying to keep the universities honest and sailing boats and God knows what else, has made an extraordinary decision: Encounter Books will no longer send review copies of its work to the New York Times Book Review. He writes:
In the last month, Encounter has had two titles on the extended New York Times best-seller list: Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor by Roy Spencer, and Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad, by Andrew C. McCarthy. But that list is the only place you will find these books mentioned in the pages of The New York Times….
Once upon a time, and not that long ago, it meant something if your book was reviewed in The New York Times Book Review. A Times review imparted a vital existential certification as well as a commercial boost. Is that still the case? Less and less, I believe. The Times in general has lost influence as the paper has receded into parochial, left-liberal boosterism and politically correct reportage. And where its news and comment have become increasingly politicized, its cultural coverage has become increasingly superficial and increasingly captive of establishment, i.e., left-liberal, pieties and “lifestyle” radicalism.