It must have been the Sausages

---By Ron Dupuis

Whenever something concerns me, really concerns me, I tend to think about it for a few days, so much so that eventually it affects my dreams. So it was with the recent Supreme Court decision on eminent domain.
The weekend last summer when the Supreme Court handed down the now famous “Eminent Domain” decision, the Dupuis residence was filled with good friends, family, and a barbecue grill filled with hot dogs, hamburgers, and my personal favorite, sausages and kielbasa. It must have been the sausages I ate that brought out the strange cast of characters that appeared right after I retired that night.

First there was Larry the Liberal, a mixture of every liberal politician I've ever met. Because it was a dream I knew he was against the war in Iraq, for better treatment for the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, and, of course, voted for Kerry in the last election. He looked an awful lot like Howard Dean.
Standing beside him was Chris the right-wing conservative. Chris wanted to nuke Baghdad in the early nineties, torture all the prisoners at Gitmo and voted for Bush, father and son. He looked eerily like Dick Nixon.
"Embrace it man." Larry said. "We could build a so much better world."
"Embrace what" I asked?
"The Supreme Court's decision, man. They're so much wiser than us and just want to help build a better world."
"I can't believe I'm agreeing with a liberal, but I quite agree," said the Nixon-clone conservative. "Seize the moment. We could affect a lot of changes for the betterment of the public welfare."
You mean to say that you guys agree with the recent decision that states that municipalities can take your homes and sell them to private companies for the betterment of the community at large?
"Of course man," exclaimed Larry. "We could take all the factories that are polluting our air and killing the innocent flowers and build parks. Take all these yuppie mansions poorer New Hampshire residents have been complaining about and grow trees to help us breathe better. Open spaces for all to enjoy."
"I don't know about growing trees," the Nixon look-a-like said. "Besides, taking the homes of hard working people is a bit drastic. Especially if they are expensively landscaped."
"Why don't we use this opportunity to help the less fortunate? We could go down to the other side of the tracks, you know, where all those people with the funny sounding names live. Help them move to better neighborhoods, tear down their homes, and sell the property to developers who will build job-producing shopping malls and modern factories."
"Parks and trees" Larry shouted.
"Malls and factories" Chris retorted.
"Parks and trees."
"Malls and factories."
I awoke in a cold sweat.
Fortunately, in the real world, the court's extension of government's ability to take private property for loosely defined economic development reasons has struck fear into the hearts of liberal and conservative alike.
Justice Stevens in his majority opinion wrote that "local governments should be given broader latitude in determining whether their citizens would be best served by condemning private property, especially where it is part of a broader scheme for redevelopment."
In my eyes, this completely invalidates the Fifth Amendment to our Constitution which states "no private property shall be taken for public use without just compensation." Taking my land or home and selling it to a private corporation for redevelopment into a hotel or shopping mall is by no stretch of the imagination "public use."
And when has anyone whose private property was taken ever been "justly compensated"? What generally happens is that the owners are paid the assessed value rather than the appraised rate.
I've spoken with both conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats in the New Hampshire House and all have promised to do something to protect property owners in this state by the next session.
It will be nice to see both sides of the aisle galvanized and working together for a common cause, for once.