Posted on 06/30/2005 6:00:49 AM PDT by KevinNuPac
I Thought We Won The Revolution
By Kevin Fobbs
As our nation leads up to our celebration of its birth, we seriously have to wonder whether or not we will have anything left of our Constitution to truly celebrate. After the "Kelo vs. City of London" decision handed down last week, where the U.S. Supreme Court performed a seeming abrupt about face on the 5th Amendment and more importantly on America, when will the Constitution be returned to the American people?
The U.S. Supreme Court's surgical disembodiment of the Fifth Amendment was, not a quick and deliberate action. Rather, it began as a stealth process born in the days of the mid-30s during President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration. This is when the essential protections, assured by prior Supreme Court rulings defending and protecting the private ownership rights of property, began to be supplanted.
Judge Janice Brown recently confirmed to the Federal Appeals Court D.C. Circuit addressed this concern in April of 2000, as she spoke to the Federalist Society in Chicago. She stressed, "Protection of property was a major casualty of the Revolution of 1937" In "Williamson v. Lee Optical" "The court drew a line between personal rights and property rights or economic interests, and applied two different constitutional tests."
"Rights were reordered and property acquired a second class status. If the right asserted was economic, the court held the Legislature could do anything it pleased. Judicial review for alleged constitutional infirmities under the due process clause was virtually nonexistent."
This is a crucial point. Americans believed up through the mid-30s that the founding fathers had safe guarded our property rights against possible government officials and courts who would attempt to repeat the previous common English government practice of granting and taking private property based upon the whims of the local official. No reason was needed nor given. Sounds eerily familiar?
So the 5th Amendment became our piece of the rock. It was our insurance policy against whimsical, malicious, capricious behavior exercised on the part of local government officials to unilaterally declare you, the property owner, a tenant in your own home, dethroned in your own castle, a serf without title to your own land.
Judge Rogers also addressed another key component of this 1930s Supreme Court dissection of our property rights. "On the other hand, if the right was personal and "fundamental," review was intolerably strict."From the Progressive era to the New Deal, property was by degrees ostracized from the company of rights."
"Something new, called economic rights, began to supplant the old property rights. This change, which occurred with remarkably little fanfare, was staggeringly significant. With the advent of "economic rights," the original meaning of rights was effectively destroyed. These new "rights" imposed obligations, not limits, on the state.
So the "Kelo" decision did not make necessarily new law, but rather re-confirmed an ever evolving doctrine of transferring personal property rights from individuals and conferring them upon the state or now in the hands of individual developers.
Even U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia had to be taken back a bit when he questioned the attorney for the city of New London, in February this year about the rationale used to deprive property rights from the city residents who would be losing their homes. Was some great public purpose to be raised to defend the city's taking of personal property?
Well not really. "Justice Antonin Scalia stated, "You can always take from A and give to B, so long as B is richer." And Justice Sandra Day O'Connor asked "What if there's a Motel 6 but the city thinks a Ritz-Carlton will generate more taxes? Is that OK?"
"Yes," the city's attorney affirmed.
What is America left with? Judge Brown believes the revolution of 1776 may be over. "What started in the 1920s; became manifest in 1937; was consolidated in the 1960s; is now either building to a crescendo or getting ready to end with a whimper." Well, we cannot afford to allow our 5th Amendment rights to go out with a whimper.
To the New London City Attorney who arrogantly uttered yes to Justice O'Connor, we must say with firm determination no more property takings, no more erosion, no more theft of our constitutional rights in broad daylight, no more city-backed shakedowns of Americans, because as Justice O' Connor put it "The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms," who will trample on the property rights of all Americans.
Over ten states are saying no as well and are fighting back to correct this decision.
Many of those states will be looking to Michigan for the template to use in successfully fighting for their resident's property rights.
Last year the Michigan Supreme Court ruled in the "County of Wayne v. Hatchcock," that my own state Supreme Court had arrived at the incorrect decision when it ruled in the court's 1981 Poletown decision. The court ruled that the state's statutes had ignored the Michigan constitution because generalized economic benefits did not constitute a legitimate public purpose which justified the exercise of eminent domain. I fully expect other states to follow Michigan's lead and modify their state constitutions as well as prepare new legislation.
Finally, one determined citizen is not taking this lying down, and he feels that at least one of the U.S. Supreme Court justices is entitled to his "Just Desserts".
On Monday the 27th, Logan Darrow Clements, CEO of Freestar Media, LLC informed Chip Meany, the Code Enforcement Officer of Weare, New Hampshire, the home town of Justice Souter, that he wants to begin the permit process to build a hotel on the land owned by Justice David H. Souter.
In his faxed letter to Chip Meany, Clements says, "I am proposing to build a hotel at 34 Cilley Hill Road in the Town of Weare. I would like to know the process your town has for allowing such a development.
Although this property is owned by an individual, David H. Souter, a recent Supreme Court decision, "Kelo vs. City of New London" clears the way for this land to be taken by the Government of Weare through eminent domain and given to my LLC for the purposes of building a hotel."
The name of the proposed development, will be "The Lost Liberty Hotel" and will feature the "Just Desserts Café" Sometimes justice can't get any better.
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Kevin Fobbs is President of National Urban Policy Action Council (NuPac), a non-partisan civic and citizen-action organization that focuses on taking the politics out of policy to secure urban America's future one neighborhood, one city, and one person at a time. View NuPac on the web at www.nupac.info. Kevin Fobbs is a regular contributing columnist to the Detroit News. He is also Outreach Communications Vice Chairman of the Michigan Republican Party and daily host of The Kevin Fobbs Show on News Talk WDTK - 1400 AM in Detroit as well as co-founder of the Jackson, MI-based American Conservative Values Television Network. Listen to The Kevin Fobbs Show online at www.wdtkam.com daily 2-3 p.m., and call in toll-free nationwide to make your opinion count at 800-923-WDTK(9385).
Increments. Gradually turning up the heat. Oh, heck he's up to my neck.
Who was it... maybe Ben Franklin... who said "We have given you a Republic, now see if you can keep it" or something like that. Looks like we LOST it.
On July 4th celebrate your lost freedoms. They are many.
The people of this country must take their Constitution back from those that are hi-jacking it on a daily basis. The socialist/leftist activists on the SCOTUS are no different than the thugs and traitors in the DNC, or the lawless judges that tried to rewrite Florida election law in 2000.
They all stand for the same thing. Power and control through judicial fiat -- the last frontier of the lawless, power-centric socialists trying to steal and destroy America.
I would give anything to see Mr. Clements successfully process his desire to build the hotel. I am sure Justice Souter is sitting there laughing, knowing that he has enough influence politically and financially to block this effort...unlike the poor Kelo folks.
But...Clements is making a beautiful statement!
I think it was "A republic ma'am, if you can keep it."
Has President Bush made any comment about the ruling?
That will happen when the enough of the American people have the spine to stand up to the court and demand changes in the court's thinking.
There are two other branches of government in this country, and neither of them have taken a stand against this activist court. Nor will they, as long as the people sheepishly accept the court's 5 to 4 interpretation of The Constitution.
Can tell you right now ain't no way Ohio will fight for our property rights.
Heck, the state is in such bad shape, run by leftists, maybe another state should just take it over using eminent domain.
We're demanding. Right now. Guess what? The powers that be are ignoring us.
'...when will the Constitution be returned to the American people?'
The question is passive, the answer then is 'never'. Rights are taken by force (in either direction, as it happens). In the girly era learn to like being on your knees--or develop some balls. I'm not going to hold my breath.
This decision comes after the decision that stole our right to speak too close to an election, and THAT decision comes after the court found, several times, 'rights' in the constitution that aren't actually there.
We did. But since then termites [Domocrats, Solialists, Communist] have infested the building,[Nation]eating away silently from the inside. We have also contracted the cancer of political correctness.
Unless both are eracated and exterminated, we will have no building [Nation].
This 4th, as we celebrate the remnants of freedom, I shall, in accordance with the law, be flying Old Glory with the union down:
In compliance with: Public Law 829 (77th Congress) Sec. 4(a) : "The flag should never be displayed with the union down SAVE AS A SIGNAL OF DIRE DISTRESS" & Title 36 U.S. Code §176(a)* (a) The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property. On December 22, 1942, Public Law 829 (77th Congress, 2nd Session) was approved, giving official sanction to most of the provisions of The Flag Code. This Public Law established The Flag Code in Title 36, United States Code, Chapter 10, Sections 173-178
...Has President Bush made any comment about the ruling?...
White House press agent mumbled something about "the court has ruled." That's all I've seen so far.
In other words, they could care less.
Don't you get it. The heat is already at full boil, we are just not dead yet.
So what do you want to do about it?
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BTTT
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