Supreme Nonsense

The recent case concerning eminent domain and the "public use" clause of the Fifth Amendment makes strange bedfellows. Normally residing at opposite ends of the political spectrum, the right and the left are partially united against the ruling of the Supreme Court which allows private recipients the rights to property already held by a private party through the use of force.

The right is adamant that this ruling is a result of judicial activism; that, to the majority of the Supremes, court precedent trumps the Constitution. The left, usually chomping at the bit to consolidate more power at the federal level at the cost of the states' and the individual's, seem mildly perturbed or even silent on the issue. Probably the most forceful response we're going to get from the left is the following, excerpted from the execrable Molly Ivins in a recent editorial:

As one who cares a whale of a lot more about personal rights than property rights, let me leap right into the fray over a Supreme Court decision on the side of the property rights advocates, many of whom I normally consider nutballs.

Notice the schism here between what she considers to be personal and property rights. This is a typical viewpoint of the left: that the right to property is not a personal right, like say, freedom of speech, which is their most fiercely guarded freedom, except of course when it comes to criticizing tinhorn dictators, brutal regimes, or printing any news from Iraq which doesn't add to the current death count. But the mask slips, and no one calls the left on it: property rights are not personal rights? Without them nothing is safe, nothing cannot be grabbed by the government. This is clearly not what the Founders intended.

The left's ambivalence about property rights springs from a deeper root cause - that wealth is not earned but distributed. Like luck, some people have it and some people don't, and it's the role of the government to redistribute it in a more "just", "caring", or "equal" manner. They object to the recent decision, mainly on the cliched Big Business versus the Little Guy routine - that it's terrible, just terrible, that Tom, Dick, or Harry will be evicted by some heartless corporation.

But in reality, under the covers, this decision is implicitly in line with how they feel about "property rights": neat, but not important. In reality, the betrayal of property rights is an omen of things to come. Freedom of speech will be the last freedom to go, as it is in any totalitarian society which rules, not by the will of the people, but by the pleasure of the elites, of the social experimenters. It is the End Result of all social tinkering. I submit that these rights to property are fundamental to any free society, and the recent denial of such, by a cadre of unelected politicians, is an affront to the Constitution and everything this county stands for. Their role is to protect the Constitution, and they failed.

Senator Biden recently said that the new appointee to the Supreme Court should be a "uniter". Justices are not supposed to "unite", they're supposed to interpret the Constitution. It would seem the good senator's remarks reflect his unstated view of the court as a political entity, with powers outside of those to which they are limited. Powerline has an excellent take on that here.
Leftists, when not in power, remind the right and Republicans that they are always to "unite", regardless of the mandate of the people; when they are in power, there is no such talk of "keeping the balance".