Stories like this just make me weep for my country.
You remember the infamous Kelo case from a couple years ago? Suzette Kelo was being forced by New London, CT to abandon her home so the government could use her property for better “public use.” Kelo took her case to the Supreme Court and lost (Naturally, Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer ruled against liberty and the Constitution; Rehnquist, O’Connor, Scalia, and Thomas dissented.)
That was 2005. So what’s been happening on the land? Nothing. In September local Connecticut news station WTNH reported:
Weeds, glass, bricks, pieces of pipe and shingle splinters have replaced the knot of aging homes at the site of the nation’s most notorious eminent domain project.
There are a few signs of life: Feral cats glare at visitors from a miniature jungle of Queen Anne’s lace, thistle and goldenrod. Gulls swoop between the lot’s towering trees and the adjacent sewage treatment plant.
But what of the promised building boom that was supposed to come wrapped and ribboned with up to 3,169 new jobs and $1.2 million a year in tax revenues? They are noticeably missing. …
New London officials decided they needed Kelo’s land and the surrounding 90 acres for a multimillion-dollar private development that included residential, hotel conference, research and development space and a new state park that would compliment a new $350 million Pfizer pharmaceutical research facility.
So what’s going on with that $350 million Pfizer facility? Again, nothing. Ain’t happenin’, the Washington Examiner reported yesterday:
Pfizer abandons site of infamous Kelo eminent domain taking
By: TIMOTHY P. CARNEY | 11/09/09 1:47 PM ESTThe private homes that New London, Conn., took away from Suzette Kelo and her neighbors have been torn down. Their former site is a wasteland of fields of weeds, a monument to the power of eminent domain.
But now Pfizer, the drug company whose neighboring research facility had been the original cause of the homes’ seizure, has just announced that it is closing up shop in New London.
So let’s recap: The government, backed by the Supreme Court, forces a woman and several of her neighbors get out of the land they rightfully own “for the public good” and now their grandiose plans aren’t happening. “Oops. Never mind.” Talk about adding insult to injury!
So the land is an unattractive, abandoned, weed-filled wasteland. I can’t think of a better picture to depict what happens when greedy power-hungry government tramples on an Americans’ basic civil rights.
Ready for another government bureaucracy with the same sense of impersonalness to take over health “care”?
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