Tag Archives: government

An Opportunity to Reverse Kelo

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Kelo v City of New London was a 2005 case involving our Constitution’s 5th Amendment Takings Clause: a homeowner who didn’t want to sell her home in New London, CT, to a property developer who said he needed the property to finish out the development of shopping mall. New London agreed on the developer’s representation that his mall would produce more tax revenue for the city than the homeowner’s property tax remittances. In the resulting suit, the Supreme Court decided that government has the authority to commit such a Taking and redistribution for the public purpose of increasing government’s tax revenue.  The Court said that one man’s private purpose is superior to another’s so that other must surrender his property to the one.

What the Takings Clause actually says is

…nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

For public use, not for public purpose, and certainly not for a private enterprise’s claimed public purpose.

Now a case is developing that should end in the Supreme Court and present the Court with an opportunity to reverse that shameful ruling.

A public school district in Texas is pursuing an eminent domain process to remove a 78-year-old man from the home that his family has owned for more than a century in order to build a high school football stadium parking lot.

The 78-yr-old homeowner’s daughter, Tara Upchurch:

I want you to understand what the significance of this place is for my father. It is where he played as a child with his grandparents, where he woke up 4 a.m. to milk cows, it’s where he spent 39 years happily married to my mom, and it’s where he raised a family, and it’s a place we never thought he would leave[.]

On the other hand,

Aldine ISD is planning to build a $50 million football field and parking lot on his property and is using eminent domain options after the Upchurch family rejected an initial offer to purchase the property last year, KPRC reported. Eminent domain allows the government to acquire private property for public use.

Aldine ISD wants it, and its desire is more important than a property owner’s…ownership. Well, then. That settles it. That’s what Kelo has wrought.

Private property ownership isn’t actually ownership: if another private entity wants it, all that one needs to do is to persuade a government or quasi-government that its desire is greater than the original owner’s ownership, and the owner must give it up.

This is the mess that Kelo caused, and this is the mess that the Supreme Court should get an opportunity to clean up, and it should clean it up.

Government Surveillance

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The French government is on the verge [a Tuesday vote as I write on Tuesday morning] of authorizing its police forces to

remotely tap into the cameras, microphones, and location services of phones and other internet-connected devices used by some criminal suspects.
The proposed law plainly stipulates that the procedure can be executed “without the knowledge or consent of its owner or possessor” but is limited to suspects involved in terrorism, organized crime, and other illegal activities punishable by five or more years in prison.

Whether the French vote is up or down, imagine such a capability in the hands of a government that considers enthusiastically protesting mothers to be potential terrorists, or a government that openly worries about traditional Catholics (or traditionals of any other religion), or a government that spies into the emails of journalists and their families, or a government that already (illegally) spies on its general citizens with the tools of an intelligence organization and a secret court system.

Blinders

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FBI Director Christopher Wray was wearing them, when he wasn’t overtly insulting the intelligence of committee members, when he testified in front of the House Judiciary Committee last Wednesday. Committee members asked Wray a number of questions that he refused to answer, even as he couched his refusal in a number of rationalizations.

Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R, OH) asked whether the FBI had asked financial institutions for customer transaction records in the DC area for the period surrounding the 6 Jan riots. Wray: I don’t know the answer.

Darrell Issa (R, CA) asked Wray whether FBI agents infiltrated those riots. Wray refused to answer altogether, referring Issa to “existing court filings.”

Matt Gaetz (R, FL) asked Wray how many times the FBI misused FISA authorities to spy on American citizens. Wray refused to say, or even to explain why the illegal searches happened.

Pramila Jayapal (D, WA) asked Wray whether the FBI was purchasing Americans’ personal data from the Internet or social media collectors. Wray refused to “confirm or deny.” When she asked how the FBI used such data, Wray said,

Respectfully, this is a topic that gets very involved to explain, so what I would prefer to do is have our subject matters come back up and brief you[.]

He thereby confirmed that his FBI does obtain such information, whether through buying it, or through other means. And his answer was insulting to the committee members, particularly to Jayapal, implying that the Congressmen were too grindingly stupid to understand the matter or by insulting their intelligence with his claim that he doesn’t understand the matter himself.

And so on through hours of testimonial evasion, pretended ignorance, and insults.

This FBI has long since outlived its usefulness, and it needs to be disbanded.

Another Excuse…

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…for Leftist-dominated governments to grab power. Farmers Insurance, and other insurance companies, are moving to restrict policy sales in California and Florida due to rising payout costs from a recent spate of natural disaster claims. Public Citizen said that such moves are

prime example of the insurance industry’s hypocrisy on climate change.

Progressive-Democratic Party politicians insist that insurance companies aren’t doing enough to combat global warming and want to impose requirements on them to do more. Connecticut’s Leftist politicians are proposing a 5% surcharge on “any premium payments from any fossil fuel company” to any insurer licensed in the state.

Insurers, in a free market economy, are in the business of insuring risk—transferring the risk of a business venture, or ownership of a home, from the venturer/homeowner to the insurer in exchange for a fee based on the risk’s likelihood of occurring and its cost should it occur.

Insurers, in the Progressive-Democrat economy, are tools of the State, usable by the State to achieve the Progressive-Democrats’ personal goals.

“America Has Too Many Rules”

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And too many laws. Jimmy Sexton, CEO of Esquire Group, is right about the rules.

More than 88,000 federal regulations were promulgated between 1995 and 2016, the most recent data I can find. The Federal Register, a compendium of each year’s new federal regulations, proposed rules and notices, totals nearly two million pages dating back to its inception in 1936. And the Code of Federal Regulations ran to 185,000 pages in 2020. In addition, state and local governments have their own laws and rules.

As he noted,

Laws should be easy to comply with and simple to enforce.

The easy compliance and enforcement isn’t only a matter of each one being short and sweet; the ease flows especially from keeping the overall number small and knowable in their aggregate.

And I’m right about too many laws, especially at the Federal level. Just on the criminal side alone, there are almost 5,200 criminal laws and roughly 300,000 regulations that can subject people to possible criminal penalties. among our statutes, even though the only crimes our Constitution actually names are treason and bribery—and the nebulous high Crimes and Misdemeanors, named in the context of impeaching the President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States. Even the first enumeration of national-level crimes, the Crimes Act of 1790, passed in the 1st Congress, identified only 21 additional crimes wanting Federal-level enforcement and punishment:

  1. treason
  2. misprision of treason (deliberate concealment)
  3. willful murder occurring on federal property
  4. rescue/attempted rescue of a body following an execution
  5. misprision of felony
  6. “man-slaughter”
  7. piracy
  8. “accessory before the fact”
  9. “accessory after the fact”
  10. confederate to piracy
  11. maiming
  12. forgery/counterfeiting/falsifying federal securities or coin
  13. altering/corruption of federal records
  14. larceny
  15. receiving stolen goods
  16. perjury
  17. subornation of perjury (contracting with another to commit perjury)
  18. bribery
  19. obstruction a federal officer
  20. rescue of an inmate
  21. violation of safe conduct/passport.

The rest of criminal behaviors and their definitions are, by design, left to the police powers of each of the several States.

The only Federal criminal laws we need, then, are few: against treason and bribery, and against each of those additional 21, each of which needs to be particularly describing these crimes’ defining criteria, and especially for those 21, particularly describing the criteria that separate them from State crimes and make them Federal crimes.

And yet we have an enormous and bureaucratic Department of Justice and a broad range of Federal police forces: the FBI, the Marshals Service, the Secret Service, each Federal cabinet has its own police force, even the Congress has the Capital Police.