What stops the federal government from merely deeding private lands to foreign governments “because they can”? Actually, nothing stops the government from doing anything, certainly not the Kelo Decision.
Without a doubt, the Supreme Court’s Kelo Decision is one of the most potentially destructive weapons a tyrant like Barack Obama has at his disposal.
We’ve heard that Dirty Harry Reid, Nevada’s real life Senator Geary, was possibly preparing to steal some of the Bundy ranch land to give to a Chinese company to run another fake “green scam.”
This begs the question: Why couldn’t the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) merely re-deed the land in question and cite the Kelo Decision as its legal grounds?
The Kelo Decision was a 2005 case in which the Supreme Court overturned the honest use of the eminent domain doctrine, which had previously allowed confiscation of private land only for purposes of direct government use, and allowed for such confiscations to be used to transfer ownership of land from one private citizen to another. The 5 to 4 vote saw Justice Anthony Kennedy join the majority and help shred the Constitution.
Now nine years later, the lawless Barack Obama stands in a position to use Kelo as a way to act like he is our Sovereign and arbitrarily strip Cliven Bundy or anyone else of property he wants to use in his next scheme.
The Bundy ranch showdown is not over. The fight might move to Texas or another Western State, but the issue remains essentially the same. Both the government and private land owners have to ask themselves whether Kelo can be used as a way for Barack Obama to declare victory and move on. If he does, he can get all those nasty videos to stop and use a show trial to crush the Tenth Amendment and the security of private land ownership forever.
After Kelo, what does your name on a deed mean besides the fact that you get to pay taxes on the land until the government decides to steal it and give it to a crony? This has never been so true as it is today.