“There is a difference between eminent domain and the New London case.”
Could you please explain . A friend of mine in CT is now having reservations about Trump because of his stance on eminenty domain and brought up the Kelo case .
The last clause of the fifth amendment says:
... nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Until New London, this clause was generally considered to be defined as a government compensating a PRIVATE entity for the PUBLIC use of a property...and public use was meant to be for a road, school, community park, etc.
New London was a disastrous decision, because it meant that PRIVATE entities could have their property confiscated and given/sold/leased to ANOTHER PRIVATE entity.
Very very bad.
Trump, I assume, agrees with the New London decision.
This is an issue where Trump is very, very wrong in my opinion. It underpins the whole notion of private property and the dissents by the conservative justices on the SCOTUS were scathing. I believe I recall Justice Thomas saying he would look forward to getting a chance to overturn the decision.
Short story is that New London, CT is a depressed town that's lost most of its tax base and due to its geography, has nowhere to grow. It's a dying town, and about 18 years ago the City Managers there tried to lure Pfizer in with the promise to revamp a large section of coastal property that was depressed in exchange for them building a big plant.
The City was able to get most of the land that they wanted for the Pfizer project, but due to Pfizer's demands they needed to condemn a small neighborhood of mostly older and working class people, some of whom didn't want to sell.
They fought for years in court, and the New London City Managers' tactics to convince Kelo and the other owners to sell ranged from aggressive to pure evil.
The Clinton puppets Ginsberg and Breyer, along with Kennedy (one of the early cases that showed him to be a horrible justice), Souter, and Stevens all sided with the City, with Stevens writing the majority. What the case essentially meant was that any government entity, state, local, federal, could take anyone's property for any reason, and that the "public use" clause in the Constitution was so broad that the government could invent whatever justification they wanted for taking property, even if it meant taking property from a homeowner and giving it to a corporation and developer against the homeowner's will, as long as it meant increased tax revenue, economic growth, or any excuse they wanted. The majority even decided that the government doesn't have to actually prove that the economic development will happen, only that they have some plan in place, even if the plan is fantastical and stupid.
The city of New London won at the Supreme Court and they bulldozed Ms. Kelo's house, along with all of the others who didn't want to sell.
In the end what ended up happening is Pfizer pulled out and the development never happened. Also, the City Managers' "Development Plans" were exposed as fraudulent and essentially non-existent. So now the property where Suzette Kelo's house stood is an undeveloped vacant lot and the city continues to be broke and depressed.
The silver lining (if there was any) on the Kelo case was that the Supreme Court's decision was so wrong and evil that the public outcry started a massive wave of eminant domain reform at the state level, so Republicans and even some Democrats started passing anti-eminent domain abuse laws in the states that better dealt with the problem, even though city and local government bulldozing over people's property rights is still a huge problem in some areas.
I couldn't in good conscience support anyone in the primary who supported the Kelo decision, as like I said, it was at best an empowerment of the most aggressive type of big government, and at worst just plain evil.
If Trump supports the decision, he either doesn't understand Kelo and has never read it, or is of the philosophy that state, local, and federal government interests has the right to forcibly transfer property from one private entity to another for any reason the government sees fit.