Property rights advocates across the country are cheering for the U.S. House of Representatives, which unanimously passed the Private Property Rights Protection Act on a voice vote Tuesday.
The measure, sponsored by Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., was part of the furious backlash against the U.S. Supreme Court’s wildly unpopular 2005 decision in Kelo v. City of New London, which approved taking property from one private citizen and giving it to another for the purpose of “economic development.”
Specifically, five of the nine justices voted that it was permissible to take Susette Kelo’s little pink bungalow and the homes of her neighbors, and use the ground under them for a multimillion-dollar urban redevelopment project.
Eminent domain condemnations must satisfy the Fifth Amendment’s takings clause — “nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.”
The Kelo decision muddied the meaning of “public use” by claiming that an urban redevelopment project might produce economic benefits that might be a public purpose that might be a public use.
The Kelo case took a reasonably solid constitutional limit on the power of government and turned it into the legal equivalent of Silly Putty.
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote one of Kelo’s four dissenting opinions. Her stinging criticism asked who benefits: “The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence in the political process, including large corporations and real estate development firms.
“As for the victims, the government now has license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to those with more. The founders cannot have intended this perverse result.”
Chuck Cushman of the American Land Rights Association reminds us how the Kelo case ended:
“The final irony is that the redeveloper couldn’t get financing and gave up. Then the city found themselves with a vacant lot on their hands and gave up. New London finally turned Susette Kelo’s house site into a waste dump.”
Before 2005 ended, the House of Representatives had denounced the high court’s decision by a vote of 365 to 33. Congress sprouted more than a dozen anti-Kelo bills, and legislators in all 50 states had their own versions.
Roger Marzulla, a Reagan-era Justice Department attorney and now one of the nation’s leading property rights lawyers, summed up the public sentiment in the title of a 2006 speech, “Does the homeowner have any rights left?”
Sensenbrenner’s bill is the latest attempt to erase the need for that question. The congressman has gathered a remarkable bipartisan coalition around this bill, shown in the semihumorous opening of his floor speech at last Tuesday’s vote.
He said, “I deeply appreciate my co-sponsor of this legislation, the gentlewoman from California, Ms. Waters. This is a Sensenbrenner-Waters bill. You will never see another Sensenbrenner-Waters bill, and that is probably one of the best reasons to vote in favor of it.”
Maxine Waters, the very liberal California Democrat, remarked in her floor speech that “If Mr. Sensenbrenner is correct, this will be probably the only time that we will come together, but we have been together on this one for a long time.”
Waters, a black congresswoman from Los Angeles, sees property rights as civil rights. Now, she has the Private Property Rights Protection Act to help — if the Senate passes it and President Obama signs it.
Take heart. A 1972 Supreme Court case called Lynch v. Household Finance Corporation held that “a fundamental interdependence exists between the personal right to liberty and the personal right in property. Neither could have meaning without the other. That rights in property are basic civil rights has long been recognized.”
Examiner Columnist Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.
