Eminent domain and withholding federal spending
Kelo just keeps getting worse and worse. It wasn’t bad enough that the Supreme Court extended eminent domain to the point that all uses are public uses--to the chagrin of liberal and conservative alike--now the House is using its most illiberal power rather than reigning in eminent domain to undercut the decision.
Nancy Pelosi says that this is an abuse of the House’s power. Which it is, but no more of an abuse than every other time the House was chosen to coerce local governments not by changing the law, but by bribery and threats.
It’s a very common tactic for Congress, and it is one of the reasons that we need to reform the tax system so that taxes go to states or local governments first, so that such coercion is less effective. While this power may be used in the service of a greater good now, usually it is used for more egregious purposes.
Highway funds are the largest source of bribes and coercion. Congress used federal highway funds to bribe states into setting a maximum speed limit of 55 miles per hour, long after it became obvious that such a low speed limit did no good for safety.
Highway funds are or have been contingent on drug-free workplace laws, metric conversion, and removing billboards from highways. Colleges must allow military recruiters on campus or face the loss of federal funds.
This reduces the effectiveness of our federal system, a system designed to allow state experimentation in order to find the most effective solutions. For example, if a state better way to monitor driver safety than a point system, they can’t use it without losing federal funds. If a state finds that something other than seat belts can provide better safety in an accident, they must still require seat belts--with primary enforcement--or they will lose federal funds. If states experiment with contractor pay, they run the risk of losing federal funds. The list goes on and on and on.
Some of the things that federal funds are withheld for--such as eminent domain abuses--are good things for congress to be addressing. The definition of “public use” in the constitution sorely needs addressing in the wake of Kelo. But withholding federal funding is not the way to do it. It creates a patchwork of regulations, encourages shell games, and holds the potential to grant undue, otherwise unconstitutional power to the federal government over local governments.
- South Dakota v. Dole (1987)
- “The Court had to consider: When Congress wants to promote certain actions, should it be able to use funding, rather than statutes, to encourage states to adopt certain policies? If so, when?”
- Interstate Highway (Wikipedia)
- “The dominant role of the federal government in road finance has enabled it to pass laws in areas outside of the powers enumerated in the federal Constitution. By threatening to withhold highway funds, the federal government has been able to force state legislatures to pass a variety of laws.”
- Foundation study shows: safe to raise freeway speed limits
- “The study of recent federal fatality rate data found states that raised freeway speed limits had a significant safety improvement.”
- House Votes To Undercut High Court On Property
- Last week’s 5 to 4 decision has drawn a swift and visceral backlash from an unusual coalition of conservatives concerned about property rights and liberals worried about the effect on poor people, whose property is often vulnerable to condemnation because it does not generate a lot of revenue.
- Even Bernie Sanders doesn’t like Kelo
- Bernie Sanders and Maxine Waters find themselves in agreement with Tom DeLay: “No court that denies property rights will long respect and recognize other basic human rights.”
- The economics of Kelo
- My favorite quote comes from the comments: “ This is one of the major problems with takings: The computation of fair market value is done in a bloodless manner, excluding from the fair market any actual market participants and substituting instead legislative or judicial imaginings of possible market participants.”
- Federal highway funds withheld from New Jersey
- According to the senators, “ The Bush administration has taken the position that New Jersey’s recent reforms in its contracting processes, known as ‘pay-to-play’ reforms, are inconsistent with federal law. Specifically, the Administration claims that this effort to restore the integrity of the competitive bidding process actually limits competition by shrinking the pool of qualified bidders.”
- Solomon Amendment
- “To comply with the Solomon Amendment, the law schools must affirmatively assist military recruiters in the same manner they assist other recruiters, which means they must propagate, accommodate, and subsidize the military’s message.”
- Lets states take charge of highway dollars
- “When the road dollars do come back from Washington, they come with strings attached in the form of expensive mandates--so expensive that they can total as much as 80 percent of the federal funds received from the U.S. Department of Transportation.”
More taxes
- A customer service model of federal spending
- “If we can put a moon on the man, why cannot we devise a system whereby every state is billed by DC annually, and let the states compete for citizens to pay the taxes?” Moving from a system where the federal government taxes individuals to one where the federal government taxes state governments makes all of our lives a lot simpler and solves a lot of thorny civil rights issues as well.
- What’s wrong with a national sales tax?
- When considering a new tax, consider how easily that tax is abused by the state and by the state’s good intentions.
- No corporation pays taxes
- Corporations don’t pay taxes. Their employees do, and their customers do. Every dollar that a company has to pay in taxes, that company must pass on to either their employees or their customers, if the company wants to stay in business.
- How to raise taxes in a Tea Party world
- If you want to raise taxes, you need to show that you can be trusted to cut spending first.
- Lifestyles of the rich and obscure
- Tax cuts for the wealthy? I’d be happier about being wealthy if the lifestyle came along with it. Instead I’m stuck with Val-U-Rite vodka.
- 16 more pages with the topic taxes, and other related pages