And this will sound like a huge cop-out, but I always jump into these things (stupidly) assuming that others have a comparable background in constitutional theory and constitutional law…and then, in those instances when it isn’t true, I don’t have the time to engage the debate. So I’m gonna try to stop posting about con theory, at least until my clerkship finishes up this fall and I have some free time. Things are way more complicated than you make them out to be, John; maybe Hamlet can elaborate. Sorry for starting something I don’t have time to finish.
Hey, I’ll admit I’m a layman. Don’t take my questions for anything other than what they are: questions. I’m trying to learn this stuff. Maybe I get ahead of myself sometimes, but in the previous post I’m really just asking a question, based on the way I see it.
No problems about not wanting to take the time to elaborate.
But don’t “sigh” me, please. That’s very patronizing.
Theres a blurb in today’s Washington Post about the situation in Loudon County, Virginia that I alluded to earlier. The long and short of that story: Loudon County is one of, if not the, fastest growing counties in the country. It is under extreme development pressures from Washingont DC. Several years ago, a slew of candidates for the Board of Supervisors ran on a “anit-sprawl” platform and won election. They then began to to institute reforms of the County’s planning regulations. Enough people in the County disagreed with the direction that the Board of Supervisors was going in that nearly the entire Board of Supervisors was removed in one election. The Board now is made up of a much more pro-development group. As the Post points out, the current members were heavily financed by the development industry, but there is also a ground swell of opposition to the direction they’ve chosen. In short, don’t underestimate the power of the electorate to change the makeup of the Board (and the direction the municipality moves). I’ve been caught in enough whipsawing of officials to personally know this to be the case as well.
As an aside, The Washington Post site requires free registration, but I’ve never gotten a single email from them or anyone else that seems remotely connected, so I wouldn’t worry too much about the registration.
Yes, well, you are by your own characterization elsewhere a New Democrat Bill-Clinton’s-cock-sucker.
As for the real progressives (not perfectly synonymous with liberals) & the real conservatives (not exactly the big-business types) a lot of us are pretty disgusted at this decision. It takes certain previous cases which were bad precedent to begin with, where a technically unconstitutional result was for exceptional reasons seen as justifiable, & reaps the fruit of those by finally tossing any pretense of clear “public use” to the wind.
By precedent, within the hermetic world of lawyers, it’s logically consistent (with previous constitutionally dubious decisions), & that’s all you can say for it. As for justice, in the real material world? It has none.
Well, I will admit, as someone raised GOP & strict constructionist who left for the Democratic Party, that while I strongly disagree with Scalia on a few theoretical issues, I have never been impressed either with the wisdom or with the perspicacity of the high court’s left wing.
A. The road is public use. Open to the general populace. The school is publicly administered (though not exactly open to the general public). The freaking strip mall is private all the way down the line.
B. What is this “will facilitate more jobs”? It is intended to do so. It might. But the ideal, the hope really, of increased tourist revenue or whatnot, is not a concrete reality, whereas the dispossession is insultingly concrete. If two things pertained–first, that this were a major industrial project; second, that the area had no resident homeowners–the city could have had a point. Using blight-oriented eminent domain rules in this instance is like amputating a healthy hand.
Oh, wait, you live in D.C. You don’t know what the ground looks like.
So democracy (which, at its worst is simply very large-scale networks of collusion) won out over the Bill of Rights & the idea of protected rights of citizens to their own homes. Gee, I guess we need a catchy one-word ideological term for not being a prick to compete with the oh-so-sacred “democracy.”
Ah, but it’s not the same. In one case, the public gets a project with a defined nonfungible good: a road. In the other, the public gets a speculative boondoggle.
Leaving Constitutional interpretation to be handled by a non-vettable, unimpeachable body of a few mediocre & average lawyers, each chosen for his perceived sympathy to the hot-button issues of the current President, with no real guarantee that they themselves are free from corruption; is a piss-poor substitute for a vital public life, where the public debates & has a chance to affect new statute & new constitutional amendments. The latter is democracy at its best. The former is paternalistism by a cartel too often incompetent in the field of a particular case, & generally unable in the process to correct their own mistakes.
Again, obsolete, dangerous, & unoccupied buildings fall under the “blight” exception in most states. The municipal government in this case never even claimed that the neighborhood was blighted. They just want to play Sim City with real people’s lives.
After all if tearing down houses and building malls serves the public by creating jobs, won’t tearing down the mall and rebuilding the houses serve the public by creating housing?
Hey, folks, I just realized, this is karma working! We swiped the land from the Native Americans, and now we get to experience it ourselves! Hopefully, we’ll get at least mint on the pillow, if not a reacharound.
I don’t see how that post makes your case at all. What I understand you to be saying is that over the course of several years, local powerbrokers were engaged in political pissing contests and implementing central plans that nobody liked. The electorate was fickle, and moved from one extreme to another. Meanwhile, whether anyone felt safe in his person and property is unclear.
It seems to me that when a magistrate comes to claim your home, solving the problem with a get-out-the vote campaign next time around is like waiting to have your brakes fixed until after you\ve smashed into a tree.
Plus, what about someone like Tuckerfan, who might not be able to find a new place to live in the same city? You can’t vote any city officials out of office if you don’t live in that city. That’s another way that this could be abused: A suburb which is mostly middle-class or upper-class, but has a neighborhood that is not so well off, decides to clear out the riffraff and put in a mall or something. The displaced residents can’t afford to buy a new house within that city, so they’re effectively exiled to another community.
