No Land Grab

Americans deserve better

Next year the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in an extraordinarily important property rights case, one that could - and should - put legal limits on "public use" of property seized under the government's power of eminent domain. Most Americans readily support the notion that there are times when the government must have the power to buy land from unwilling sellers, such as to build a road. But in recent years local governments across the nation have begun to abuse the awesome power of property condemnation merely, in the words of attorney Clint Bolick of the Institute for Justice, "to transfer property from one private owner to another, more politically powerful private owner in the name of economic development."

The victims usually are ordinary people. In a current case, the city of New London, Conn., wants to demolish a working-class neighborhood of modest homes to make way for private office space and other unspecified commercial development adjacent to a Pfizer plant. In Arizona, a city recently attempted to condemn an independent brake shop to make way for a big hardware store that wanted the location for expansion. And in one of the more infamous cases of abuse, an entire community in Detroit's "Poletown" was condemned for a General Motors plant that was never built; the Michigan Supreme Court recently overturned that taking.

The Institute for Justice has documented more than 10,000 cases of such obvious abuse of the government's power of eminent domain under the Fifth Amendment.

Sadly - infuriatingly, actually - the Bush White House appears to be having a difficult time deciding which side it should be on in this case. Some reports suggest that the Bush administration, under pressure from big business interests that benefit from eminent domain abuse, may actually file a brief against property rights in this case. If so, that is certainly not in keeping with what most Bush voters surely would expect.

Concern about the administration's possible hostility to ordinary property owners is so great that 44 conservative and libertarian organizations, ranging from the Institute to the National Taxpayers Union and the Family Research Council, have sent a highly unusual joint letter to the White House pleading for the president to order his lawyers to at least, if they can't bear to do the right thing and support limitations on the government's condemnation power, to stay on the sidelines.

But Americans deserve better than that. They deserve to have the White House stick up for ordinary Americans' property rights and for a recognition that there properly should be limits to government power, especially the power to take property gained by the sweat of one's brow.