The Left Reacts To Kelo

In These Times has the left-wing take on Kelo:

The lawyers for the homeowners came from the Institute for Justice, a libertarian legal group that is part of the property rights movement. Property rights advocates argue that much government regulation, from environmental laws to New Deal legislation, constitutes illegal “takings” of private property without compensation. “The [Kelo] opinion is written so that government can take property for anything it feels like,” argued Institute for Justice attorney Dana Berliner. “With that decision we knew immediately there would be some sort of backlash.”

There was, and it went far beyond the libertarian right. Some polls showed close to 90 percent of respondents hostile to using eminent domain for economic development, with a strong majority even critical of using eminent domain to build roads. Legislators in more than two dozen states are now planning legislation that would curb the power of state or local governments to take private property for any private economic development project (often with the sole exception in cases of “blight”). Members of Congress have introduced at least nine measures, including one denying federal funds to any local government that uses eminent domain for economic development.

The issue is pushed mainly by conservative Republicans and libertarian right groups like The Castle Coalition (an offshoot of the Institute for Justice). Grover Norquist, the influential right-wing strategist who heads Americans for Tax Reform, told The Economist that “twenty years from now, people will look back at Kelo the way people look back at Roe v. Wade,” spawning a property rights movement as potent as the anti-abortion movement.

Anyone interested in the Kelo decision should read this one.