Our good friend and Sparky creator Tom Tomorrow is still concerned about the recent Supreme Court Kelo decision:

Personally, I'm glad to see so many of our conservative friends finally beginning to develop a healthy distust of government/corporate collusion (now if only they'd extend it to, say, Halliburton's role in Iraq). I'm just not sure why anyone on my side of the fence would feel anything but disgust. Kelo is essentially a decision in favor of trickle-down economics: clear out the poor folks, bring in some businesses, and if all works according to plan the new tax revenue will make it all worthwhile. But these things often do not work according to plan:

I was also concerned about this when it happened, although my first post was the concurring/controlling opinion that this "may not be quite the unlimited power grab that, quite honestly, it really appears to be." I've become more calm in the intervening fortnight.

The marvelous Zoe Kentucky of Demagogue recently approved of the semi-jokey plan to evict Justice Sourter from his own home to develop the "Lost Liberty Hotel." In the only and unheralded comment to that post, I wrote:

The point of Kelo is that the state, not the federal courts, decide[s] what is "public use" of land. Several states already disallow ue of eminent domain to seize land to give to private concerns unless the property is "blighted", which has a specific legal meaning. We should be pressing the other states to adopt a similar standard, and not cursing the federal courts for telling Connecticut that has no right to decide what "public use" means in its own state.

If this had gone the other way, we would have faced a really dismal prospect: a federal definition of "public use" that, for example, favored Halliburton in every state despite local opinion.

Kelo said that Connecticut gets to decide what "public use" means in Connecticut as long as it's on a rational basis, and the state showed plenty of evidence for the rationality of the condemnations it wanted, even if the majority of us disagree with them. The solution is not dispossessing David Souter, it's getting Connecticut to change its laws.

Nathan Newman, who is at times confrontationally progressive, pointed out back in February that if the federal courts can overturn eminent domain actions as an illegal "taking," even when the property owners are provided market value for their property, then the courts can also overturn rent control, price caps, and similar laws as "illegal takings" from the property holder.

Nathan goes even farther in the comments, pointing out that market value is "weird" for land because any piece of property is "monopoly" access to that portion of the earth. (Nathan, with his strongly urban view, also notes that renters being dispossessed without any of the compensation benefit of eminent domain is a much bigger problem than "this outrage on behalf an incredibly tiny number of homeowners.")

While the specifics in Kelo are still abominable to me, I do have to agree that the decision about whether the government should take the land should be a local one, not a federal one. However, I also strongly support changes in state laws to forbid such seizures for private development unless the land is "blighted."

Oklahoma does not have such a law, but it took only days for one to be proposed. What really amuses me in all this is that the strongly pro-development Republicans are falling all over themselves to write bills that would prohibit the kind of eminent domain seizures that benefit their big donors, but would still permit seizures for "public use" causes they oppose, like public schools, environmental protection, and open spaces.

Under the presumption that they can't really be ignoring the big money, I caution progressives to examine these new bills carefully to make sure they only prohibit eminent specifically to benefit privatey development unless the land is "blighted," and that there be a specific, development-neutral definition of "blighted" in the statute.

The guvmint still might be coming for your house, but if we can get the laws changed, they won't do so unless you've let it go completely to seed - and Halliburton won't be able to go to federal court and get it anyway. That's a win.