Thread: Factchecker: Donald Trump supports eminent domain

Originally Posted by Judy

Eminent domain is in the US Constitution. The US Supreme Court in the Kelo Decision has ruled that state and local governments can take a property for an economic development project that generates new tax revenues in accordance with their own laws and state Constitutions. Raising this issue is not vetting, it's disputing settled constitutional law. States have the right to restrict themselves through their own laws or Constitutional provisions to prevent their state and local governments from doing this. So it's a state issue, not a federal issue, and has nothing to do with the Office of the Presidency of the United States. It never did, the Kelo decision is about the rights of states and local governments to take property rights from one and transfer them to another for a public purpose or benefit. If you don't want that in your state, then pass a law or amend your Constitution, whichever is needed to prevent it.

I'm sorry, many people wouldn't agree with you, nor would they agree that eminent domain laws are just and proper! As for Trump attempting to utilize eminent domain for his financial benefit, I would say that says something about his character, which does have something to do with being a suitable presidential candidate.

Are we now at a point in this country that we no longer feel the character of an individual is important in determining the suitability of a politician who is elected to represent us? Ascertaining the character of a person is part of the vetting process, isn't it?

Originally Posted by MW

I'm sorry, many people wouldn't agree with you, nor would they agree that eminent domain laws are just and proper! As for Trump attempting to utilize eminent domain for his financial benefit, I would say that says something about his character, which does have something to do with being a suitable presidential candidate.

Then join them and support someone else that you think has a higher character. Your article seems to like Bernie Sanders. He's very popular right now. Maybe he's your man. Whoever it is, I'm sure we all support your struggle to find a candidate you can vote for and not regret later.

Excerpt:

No one doubts that eminent domain is necessary for a government to build necessary roads, bridges and tunnels. Eminent domain is abused when it helps a private developer acquire cheap land to build a sports stadium, or a shopping mall, or to help a university expand. The flawed theory is that there is a “public benefit” in taking land from the politically weak and giving it to the politically strong, because they’re naturally better citizens. It goes against the basic American principles of life, liberty and property.

http://www.redstate.com/diary/barryp...veloper-is-ok/

Originally Posted by Captainron

If this forum wastes time, while one immigration schemes AFTER ANOTHER, is hatched from the depths of who knows where, maybe I should just drop out of it? This is not supposed to be a place to vent Party infighting., and miscellaneous conspiracy theories, alien encounters (the outer space kind), political hero worship.....

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Originally Posted by Judy

Then join them and support someone else that you think has a higher character. Your article seems to like Bernie Sanders. He's very popular right now. Maybe he's your man. Whoever it is, I'm sure we all support your struggle to find a candidate you can vote for and not regret later.

Please do not patronize me. I've already made it very clear that I will vote for Trump. Excuse me for not gushing all over him constantly the way you have chosen to do. Trump is a man just like any other. He has his strong points and his flaws. He is not perfect and I find it a little demeaning that you routinely call me out for bringing up his flaws.

Originally Posted by MW

I'm sorry, many people wouldn't agree with you, nor would they agree that eminent domain laws are just and proper! As for Trump attempting to utilize eminent domain for his financial benefit, I would say that says something about his character, which does have something to do with being a suitable presidential candidate.

Are we now at a point in this country that we no longer feel the character of an individual is important in determining the suitability of a politician who is elected to represent us? Ascertaining the character of a person is part of the vetting process, isn't it?

Absolutely, character is a crucial issue of selecting our candidates. It's what kind of character do you want? Do you want the "character" that leaves run-down cities and blighted areas run-down and blighted with no jobs, no money, no nice buildings or housing for people to live and work in where thieves, murderers, rapists, gangs, prostitutes and drug dealers are the city council? Or do you want the "character" of someone who spends their time trying to fix an area, to improve it, to create jobs, to make it clean, safe, nice and appealing for people to work and live in and visit and spend money and by doing so runs the thieves, murderers, rapists, gangs, prostitutes and drug dealers out of town?

It depends on your end game, what "character" you want in public office. Someone who fixes decrepit blighted areas or someone who continues to ignore them. And when it's local government doing these things, the "characters" you need to be vetting are state and local government politicians, not ones running for President of the United States.

There are far more properties "taken" by state and local governments for delinquent income and property taxes than eminent domain. I suppose you're fine with that, right? Government gets those without any compensation at all.

Originally Posted by Captainron

If this forum wastes time, . . . maybe I should just drop out of it? . . .

The stuff that you aren't interested in only waste YOUR time if you read it.
Do what I do.
Skip over most comments or articles that have certain peoples names on them.
Or only read the first sentence
and then shut out the rest of it if it doesn't interest you.
Stick around and have a good laugh.

Originally Posted by Judy

Absolutely, character is a crucial issue of selecting our candidates. It's what kind of character do you want? Do you want the "character" that leaves run-down cities and blighted areas run-down and blighted with no jobs, no money, no nice buildings or housing for people to live and work in where thieves, murderers, rapists, gangs, prostitutes and drug dealers are the city council? Or do you want the "character" of someone who spends their time trying to fix an area, to improve it, to create jobs, to make it clean, safe, nice and appealing for people to work and live in and visit and spend money and by doing so runs the thieves, murderers, rapists, gangs, prostitutes and drug dealers out of town?

It depends on your end game, what "character" you want in public office. Someone who fixes decrepit blighted areas or someone who continues to ignore them. And when it's local government doing these things, the "characters" you need to be vetting are state and local government politicians, not ones running for President of the United States.

There are far more properties "taken" by state and local governments for delinquent income and property taxes than eminent domain. I suppose you're fine with that, right? Government gets those without any compensation at all.

Nice try at attempting to direct the argument in a way to seem favorable to those who support eminent domain. Truth be know, there are people like you and I that lose their property all the time to eminent domain and it's not because it's blighted or taxes are owed on it.

Originally Posted by MW

Nice try at attempting to direct the argument in a way to seem favorable to those who support eminent domain. Truth be know, there are people like you and I that lose their property all the time to eminent domain and it's not because it's blighted or taxes are owed on it.

Really? Could you name one?

I can name one and probably several more. Just google "eminent domain abuse" and you will get pages.

From the Boston Globe:

Eminent disaster

Homeowners in Connecticut town were dispossessed for nothing

GETTY IMAGES

A 2005 photo shows Susette Kelo’s house near foundations from recently destroyed homes. Kelo’s home was eventually relocated.

By Jeff Jacoby GLOBE COLUMNIST MARCH 12, 2014

NEARLY NINE years have elapsed since the US Supreme Court, in one of its most notorious rulings, decided that seven homeowners in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood of New London, Conn., had no property rights which City Hall was bound to respect. Today Fort Trumbull is a wasteland, as a detailed new report confirms.

The court’s 5-4 holding in Kelo v. City of New London gave local officials a green light to seize and demolish private homes through eminent domain, then turn the land over to developers itching to build something more lucrative. In Fort Trumbull, those private homeowners included people such as Susette Kelo, a local nurse who bought her little Victorian cottage on the Thames River because she loved its waterfront view; Wilhelmina Dery, who was born in her house on Walbach Street in 1918 and had been living there all her life; and Pasquale and Margherita Cristofaro, whose home on Goshen Street was the second New London property they lost to eminent domain, the first having been taken 30 years earlier because the city intended to construct a seawall. (The seawall was never built.)

Their homes, like those of their neighbors, were targeted by Pfizer. The pharmaceutical giant was building a major research facility nearby and wanted city officials to pave the way for a “world-class redevelopment” that would appeal to the business leaders, scientists, and other professionals the new headquarters was expected to attract. “Pfizer wants a nice place to operate,” a supercilious executive said in 2001. “We don’t want to be surrounded by tenements.”

The Fifth Amendment’s “takings clause” authorizes eminent-domain takings, but only when property is needed “for public use” — for example, to build a post office or widen a road. Fort Trumbull’s homeowners argued all the way up to the Supreme Court that their homes weren’t being seized for “public use” but for private use. Under the Constitution, they insisted, the city had no right to forcibly transfer their property to a private developer in the hope that new development would yield higher tax revenues or new jobs.

But five justices — John Paul Stevens, Stephen Breyer, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Anthony Kennedy — decided otherwise. With their imprimatur, New London confiscated the modest but well-cared-for homes of Fort Trumbull. The last remaining owners were forced out. The bulldozers moved in. The land was cleared for the kind of upscale redevelopment that Pfizer and its political allies in New London craved: a posh hotel, a conference center, a condominium complex, a health club, and high-end shops.

And how did it all end up?

When journalist Charlotte Allen went recently to New London to find out, what she found, as she reported in The Weekly Standard, was “a vast, empty field — 90 acres — that was entirely uninhabited and looked as though it had always been that way.” There is no hotel, no health club, no condos. The neighborhood that for generations had been home to working-class families like the Derys and Cristofaros is now a “deserted incline,” where the only signs of life are “waist-high dead weeds.”
The homeowners were dispossessed for nothing. Fort Trumbull was never redeveloped. Pfizer itself bailed out of New London in 2009. The Kelo decision was a disaster, as even the city’s present political leaders acknowledge. Allen writes that the current mayor, who was elected in 2011, has formally apologized to the Kelo plaintiffs, calling the decision a “black stain” on New London’s reputation. City officials agreed to install a plaque on the heights above the Thames in memory of Margherita Cristofaro, who died during the long legal battle. It notes that she and her family “made significant contributions to the Italian-American community, sacrificing two family homes to the eminent domain process.”

If anything good came of Kelo, it was the furious nationwide backlash, which led a number of states — Massachusetts, unfortunately, not among them — to pass new laws protecting property owners from abusive eminent-domain takings. But such still happens, and will go on happening until Kelo is overruled.

The founders put the takings clause in the Bill of Rights for a reason. The desolation that is Fort Trumbull is a grim reminder that where property rights aren’t secure, neither is freedom — and without freedom, there is nothing the government can’t destroy.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/...h0L/story.html