eagle_template

A very simple yet elegant and painless solution to the recent Supreme Court decision regarding the confiscation of private homes.?

A simple way to prevent local Municipalities from confiscating private property and selling it to private enterprises is for the state to file for the same properties that the city wants. The state can say they need to use the property for something such as an office building. That will immediately freeze the city's claim and prevent them from proceeding with any further action against the property.*

It creates a conflict concerning which agency, the state or the municipal government, has the right to confiscate the property. The case must then be taken to a court for a decision by a judge. The judge will automatically find that the state has a greater 'imminent domain' than does the municipal government. (Essentially, the state is bigger.)

Once the city's claim is found to be invalid then the state can drop their claim for the property and say they don't need it for an office building after all.

Yes, the city can start all over again but so can the state. Rest assured that when this technique was used 200 years ago the local government gave up and then they were all voted out of office in the very next election.

This was used during the time of the Continental Congress which was a period of about ten years between the time of the Revolution and the signing of the US Constitution. Of course now the Federal Government could act the same part that the state did then. That way the federal government could enforce the Fifth Amendment without resorting to the Supreme Court.

A Federal agency could be created within the Justice Department to do this. It would take only an extremely small budget and perhaps two attorneys, with a few support personnel, in order to deal with this problem where ever it occurs in the country.**

*I don't seem to recall most of the legal terms and some of them that I do recall have changed in their meaning. So please bear with me in regards to my butchery of legalese.

**I intend to approach my senator about the possibility of legislating this agency into existence. Why? It is true that the states do prevent municipalities from confiscating property and giving it to other private enterprises by mainly passing laws simply prohibiting them from do it. However, that is not really adequate for a number of reasons.

People change and who knows what the states will decide to do next year, or in five years, etc. This is particularly a problem for foreign investors. They know that they could end up becoming the focus of a selective confiscation of property focusing particularly on foreigners.

The main thing that will assure those investors that it cannot occur is if the Federal government was fully committed to preventing it. Having an agency whose sole purpose was preventing this immoral confiscation of property from ever happening would assure most foreign investors that it wont happen.

The forming of this agency and funding it at a cost of around $500,000 a year would probably increase foreign investments in the US by billions of dollars.