Stephan raises a good question. I have never cheered decisions rendered by any branch of the state. Even acts that have a superficial appearance of correctness, almost always end up having been undertaken for the wrong reasons. It’s the old “broken clock” principle again.
I was amused by the twittish Nancy Pelosi’s condemnation of the congressional response to Kelo. After all, where does congress come off acting as though it – rather than the president and/or the judiciary – should be in charge of directing the policies of the state? The socialist (oops, “independent”) Bernie Sanders voted against the measure, doubtless out of a sense that any restrictions upon the state’s power to take private property would set a bad precedent.
It may be that the Kelo decision plumbed the depths of people’s willingness to have their lives, liberties, and property subject to the whims of their state masters. Perhaps a court ruling telling Americans that even their homes could be taken by the corporate-state establishment aroused some long-dormant sentiments about individual liberty. Left unchecked, such a stirring might give rise to other inquiries into the breadth of state power! Like the denizens of Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” the ovine herds might become restless as they contemplate how the engineers of the power structure – along with their friends – live it up at their expense!
It should come as no surprise, therefore, that congress would want to extinguish any burgeoning brush-fires of doubt about state power. Coming as this measure did some ten days after the Kelo decision, the minds of most Americans can now be returned to their narcotic slumbers. Kelo was just a momentary aberration; all is still “for the best in this best of all possible worlds;” return to Fox Snooze and such major issues of the day as the search for a missing teenager in Aruba or the medical opinions of Tom Cruise!
12:03 pm on July 1, 2005
