Supreme Court seems to side with government and against the American people

Hearing arguments this week, U.S. Supreme Court justices appeared to be favoring the argument that local and state governments should be allowed to force you to sell your property without question to new owners if the new owners will improve the property enough to pay more taxes than you.

Eminent domain is the power of the government to force you to sell your private property to the government for public uses such as schools and roads. Increasingly, governments are forcing people to sell their homes and businesses and handing them over to private developers who can build more expensive homes or businesses on the property, therefore creating more tax revenues for the government.

In their questioning of the lawyers for each side, the court justices (or should I say court jesters, because they seem to be making a joke of the U.S. Constitution?) appeared to be siding with the attorney for the city of New London, Conn., when he stated that local and state governments should be allowed to take your private property without question and turn it over to new owners if the new owners will improve the property enough to pay more taxes than you.

When In-justice Sandra Day O'Connor asked New London's attorney if it would be “Okay” for a city to replace a Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton “if the city felt Ritz-Carlton could pay more tax,” the attorney said “yes.” And it looks like a majority of the in-justices may end up agreeing with him.

That means that governments can take your home if someone is willing to build a bigger, more expensive house on it, or take your family business if a new, more expensive chain store wants your prized lot.

They call that economic development. I call it theft. It means that none of us will really ever own our property.

The Supreme Court may soon give a green light to local and state governments that might not have tried to exercise eminent domain in the past because they feared long court battles with landowners.

Yes, if the Supreme Court announces a decision in favor of governments over the people, city councils and state agencies looking for additional revenues to feed their every increasing bellies of government programs will look to throw cheap property taxpayers out on the street and replace them with those who will pay more.

Watch out, churches. You are the cheapest property taxpayers of all. Your land could be an easy target for “revenue enhancement.”

Watch out, minority and elderly neighborhoods. For years you have been easy targets for property confiscation. Minority and elderly neighborhoods statistically pay less property tax. These neighbors generally have been less able to pay for attorneys to defend their rights.

In the U.S. between 1998 and 2002, there were more than 10,000 actual or threatened cases of eminent domain abuse involving private owner-to-private developer transfers of property. Expect that number to skyrocket.

The Supreme Court in-justices suggested their reasoning for potentially siding with governments is that for the last 50 years eminent domain has been used in this fashion, and that a decision in favor of property rights would reverse all the cases that were decided in favor of the land-stealers for the last 50 years.

This is like arguing that freeing the slaves wouldn’t be right because it would reverse all the earlier court decisions that upheld slavery!

Eminent domain is also in the forefront in Virginia this month.

Virginia has one of the worst property rights records in the country, as evidenced by two bills that recently passed the House and Senate, which strengthened some rights of landowners, but not before they were severely weakened by the Senate.

The first bill requires governments and their agencies using eminent domain to offer the landowner the full, fair, appraised value of the property. Often, landowners are offered less than market prices for their property and have to go to court at their own expense to get fair prices.

The bill as it passed the House required courts to award the court costs if landowners proved that their property was worth 30 percent more than they were offered for it. The Senate weakened the bill by giving judges discretion over awarding court costs.

The second bill requires courts to award court costs to those landowners whose property has been damaged during a survey or inspection by agents wanting to seize the property. Currently, the government can come in unannounced and run vehicles over the land, tearing it up, and the landowners receive no compensation for damages.

The gutless Senate weakened this bill, too, requiring a landowner to prove the damage had been done maliciously, willfully, or recklessly. So if the damage was “just an accident,” the landowner has to pay for the cost of repairs himself.

The General Assembly wouldn’t address the issue of forbidding governments from taking land from one private owner and giving it to another, so it’s likely that Virginians won’t have any protection from a potentially bad Supreme Court decision expected this July.