Bernie Sanders’ criticism of the Kelo ruling, Trump defended the decision, arguing that the person whose house is being taken ends up getting “four, five, six, ten times what it’s worth”. “Don’t forget, they get a lot of money”, he said. But sometimes you have people that want to hold out just for the – most of the time, I will say, I’ve done a lot of outparcels, I call them outparcels. His dismissive taunts that homeowners just want to engage in “extortion” when they refuse to sell, and his cheerful endorsement of government force to remove them from their properties under those circumstances to give access to private developers such as himself, should have conservatives asking whether this is the direction in which they want to move the Republican Party for the future. It’s very rarely that they say ‘I love my house.
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I think eminent domain is wonderful, if you’re building a highway, and you need to build, as an example, a highway, and you’re going to be blocked by a holdout, or, in a few cases, it’s a holdout-just so you understand, nobody knows this better than I do, because I built a lot of buildings in Manhattan, and you’ll have 12 sites and you’ll get 11 and you’ll have the one holdout and you end up building around them and everything else, okay?
One of the things that got highlighted yesterday during Bret Baier’s interview of Donald Trump is that Trump takes a big government view of private property rights.
As a small government conservative, I found the remarks quite troubling.
My take: Inasmuch as American conservatism is about conserving these foundational rights, Trump’s record on life and property is demonstrably checkered (and I’m not so sure about his record on preserving individual liberty, either).
The condescending rhetoric wasn’t empty or theoretical, of course.
Can a candidate win the Republican presidential nomination by extolling the virtues of eminent domain? Trump said with amusement. The other involved an elderly widow from Atlantic City who owned property near the Trump Plaza Hotel for three decades. He tried to negotiate with her, even offering her $1 million at one point.
“Donald Trump’s been a big fan of this [eminent domain]”, 2016 presidential candidate Rand Paul in September, according to CBS News.
Thanks to the expert legal help of the Institute for Justice, whose lawyers represented Coking, the CRDC’s desire to wield eminent domain on Trump’s behalf was laughed out of court.
“At least there’s a crucial issue that Trump hasn’t flip-flopped on”, said Doug Sachtleben, spokesman for the Club for Growth, the conservative group Trump has been warring with for months. I also understand that the Supreme Court decided in 2005 that the “public use” of property could extend to “private use” as long as more tax revenue was generated by the new property owner.
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You’d think it would, but so far it hasn’t.
