Hee hee!
None other than Mr. Yeagh!-Man himself has joined the chorus of opposition to the Supreme Court’s outrageous decision in Kelo vs. City of New London–that’s the 5-4 ruling that allows the government to seize your home in the name of “urban renewal” and hand it over to a developer to tear it down and build a condo complex or a shopping mall or whatever your city decides might generate more property-tax revenues than you do.
I couldn’t agree more with Dean when he said last week: “We think that eminent domain does not belong in the private sector. It is for public use only.” A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an op-ed article for the Washington Post lamenting the horror and the heartbreak wreaked in Southwest Washington, D.C., when the Supreme Court allowed a redevelopment agency 50 years ago to destroy hundreds of homes and businesses in the name of urban revitalization that never quite arrived.
And since Dean is chairman of the Democratic National Committee, that “we” meant that he was committing the entire Democratic Party to the position that the Kelo decision should be overturned as soon as possible. That means, of course, that we need a strong advocate of property rights to occupy the seat left vacant by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement. And I’ve got just the nominee that Dean and his party will surely be happy to endorse: John R. Roberts.
Trouble was, as Town Hall reports (hat tip to Patterico’s Pontifications via Instapundit), Dean seemed to be under the impression that the Kelo ruling, which allows the city of New London, Conn. to demolish homes that had been in working-class families for generations, was the product of the Supreme Court’s conservative bloc–and hence, somehow, the fault of You Know Who.
As Dean blasted in his inimitable style: “The president and his right-wing Supreme Court think it is ‘okay’ to have the government take your house if they feel like putting a hotel where your house is.”
Now, Howard, your heart’s in the right place–but I must inform you that the “right-wing” Supreme Court justices (you obviously mean Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas) all voted to dissent to the Kelo ruling, signing on to a sarcasm-dripping dissenting opinion written by O?Connor in what was surely her finest hour on the high court. It was the Supreme Court’s liberal faction–Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and Stephen Breyer–who voted along with Justice Anthony Kennedy to approve New London’s demolition derby. And that figures: Liberals claim to be on the side of the little people, but their true passion is for unlimited government power over the lives and property of citizens.
But hey–let’s not let a little mistake of fact get in the way of a very important new political and jurisprudential development: Howard Dean and his Democrats want to see more Antonin Scalias on the U.S. Supreme Court!
And that’s good news. Now we’re waiting for Dean and the Dems to follow up with that endorsement of Roberts. No, he’s not as colorful as Scalia, but you can’t have everything.