Proof That Many of Those Who Claim to Be Against the Kelo Ruling Really Aren’t
From an Amy Ridenour post at the National Center Blog, linking to (of all things) a National Center press release:
Environmental Activists Target Small Property Owners While Calling the Fifth Amendment a “New Entitlementâ€
Washington, D.C. - The environmental community is in an uproar this week over a proposed measure that would reform the Endangered Species Act by including within it modest property rights protections for small landowners.
The “Threatened and Endangered Species Reform Act” (TESRA) is being debated now and is expected to face a vote today in the House of Representatives.
If green lobbyists and their congressional allies get their way, American property owners will continue to have their rights trampled by the Endangered Species Act.
“In light of the enormous outcry over the dreadful Kelo v. New London ruling, it’s hard to believe that anyone would so vehemently oppose protecting the property rights of American landowners,” said Peyton Knight, Director of the John P. McGovern MD Center for Environmental and Regulatory Affairs of the National Center for Public Policy Research. “Indifference to the suffering of small property owners would be bad enough, but actively seeking to harm them is beyond the pale.”
Knight refers to the onslaught of anti-property rights rhetoric that has poured out of the environmental community this week as a result of the proposal that landowners should receive compensation when the government takes their property under the Endangered Species Act.
Under current law, the ESA takes private property without paying the owner a dime.
One provision in TESRA would help resolve this problem by providing fair compensation to landowners who lose the use of their property as a result of the ESA. Environmentalists have made gutting this protection a top priority.
A “Dear Colleague” letter being circulated by Representatives Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) and John Conyers (D-MI) vilifies the compensation provision as a “sweeping new entitlement program.”
There’s a term for taking someone’s land without compensation: stealing.
Current law that authorizes the stealing is a travesty. Those who believe that taking someone’s property without compensation over an endangered critter is okay cannot possibly, or at least consistently, have a problem with taking it away for another lawmaker-sanctioned “higher purpose.”
