“Thou shalt not steal.”–God

Well, well, well. Looka here.

Pfizer has fled the scene of the crime and the New London city government has been arrested behind the wheel of the getaway car. Mom was right; crime doesn’t pay.

Do yourself a favor and read Clarence Thomas’ opinion sometime. Harry Reid says Justice Thomas can’t put two sentences together, but Harry Reid couldn’t put the Double-Mint Twins together if they were co-joined.

But since we both know you’re lazy, here you go:

Long ago, William Blackstone wrote that “the law of the land … postpones even public necessity to the sacred and inviolable rights of private property.”

The Framers embodied that principle in the Constitution, allowing the government to take property not for “public necessity,” but instead for “public use.” Defying this understanding, the Court replaces the Public Use Clause with a Public Purpose Clause (or perhaps the “Diverse and Always Evolving Needs of Society” Clause), a restriction that is satisfied, the Court instructs, so long as the purpose is “legitimate” and the means “not irrational,”.

This deferential shift in phraseology enables the Court to hold, against all common sense, that a costly urban-renewal project whose stated purpose is a vague promise of new jobs and increased tax revenue, but which is also suspiciously agreeable to the Pfizer Corporation, is for a “public use.”

I cannot agree. If such “economic development” takings are for a “public use,” any taking is, and the Court has erased the Public Use Clause from our Constitution, as Justice O’Connor powerfully argues in dissent. I do not believe that this Court can eliminate liberties expressly enumerated in the Constitution and therefore join her dissenting opinion.

Regrettably, however, the Court’s error runs deeper than this. Today’s decision is simply the latest in a string of our cases construing the Public Use Clause to be a virtual nullity, without the slightest nod to its original meaning. In my view, the Public Use Clause, originally understood, is a meaningful limit on the government’s eminent domain power. Our cases have strayed from the Clause’s original meaning, and I would reconsider them.

The Court has elsewhere recognized “the overriding respect for the sanctity of the home that has been embedded in our traditions since the origins of the Republic,” when the issue is only whether the government may search a home. Yet today the Court tells us that we are not to “second-guess the City’s considered judgments,” when the issue is, instead, whether the government may take the infinitely more intrusive step of tearing down petitioners’ homes.

Something has gone seriously awry with this Court’s interpretation of the Constitution. Though citizens are safe from the government in their homes, the homes themselves are not. Once one accepts, as the Court at least nominally does, that the Public Use Clause is a limit on the eminent domain power of the Federal Government and the States, there is no justification for the almost complete deference it grants to legislatures as to what satisfies it.

When faced with a clash of constitutional principle and a line of unreasoned cases wholly divorced from the text, history, and structure of our founding document, we should not hesitate to resolve the tension in favor of the Constitution’s original meaning. For the reasons I have given, and for the reasons given in Justice O’Connor’s dissent, the conflict of principle raised by this boundless use of the eminent domain power should be resolved in petitioners’ favor. I would reverse the judgment of the Connecticut Supreme Court.