According to SCOTUSblog, the Supreme Court just handed down a win (my interpretation) yesterday. It is about the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment.
Without getting into the weeds of the legal arguments, this case is a win on four issues beyond the actual case: (1) people can now sue governments for unconstitutional takings of their property in federal court without having to go through state courts first; (2) the Court demonstrated a willingness to overturn precedent when that precedent is wrong; (3) the five allegedly-originalist justices lived up to their bidding by ruling based on the plain language meaning of the Fifth Amendment; and (4) the 5-4 split starkly demonstrates the hollow claim the left-leaning justices make to being in favor of individual rights.
On the last point, the leftists of the Court clearly came down on the side of big government against private property rights. They howled about overturning precedent (providing themselves with a basis to justify themselves should Roe v. Wade ever be overturned), but the result itself, that individual rights are being trampled by government, would have been self-evident to any serious libertarian on the left or right.
Last time I posted about the Supremes, it was more brief, and I didn’t delineate the interesting split on the Court, which was (IIRC) that a couple of the leftists sided with Clarence and Gorsuch on libertarian principles, while the other alleged conservatives were in dissent. But this time, libertarianism had to take a back seat for the leftists, because of the assault on stare decisis (precedent).
And that is precisely why the opinion in this case may turn out to be significant. Leaving Roe aside, the fact that the originalists on the Court are able to convince a majority of the Court to side with them in overturning bad precedent (when Scalia, for example, was highly deferential to precedent and thus blocked overturning several bad precedents), demonstrates hope for future cases to at least trim back some of the over-reaches of big government. (For example, the Commerce Clause.)
2 replies on “Supremes get it right again”
Not sure left liberation is a thing in the US. Left Anarchist is a thing but free market capitalism is an integrated part of libertarianism as formulated in the US. The term was coined in France and there it assumed socialism, Just goes to show you how screwed up France is. Murray Rothbard’s usage in the US is basically free market capitalist and conservative.
Well, perhaps liberal is a better term but what I meant was the streak that loves individual rights but still thinks we can have them and socialism too. It’s a trend that is definitely present in modern legal thought. But I have noticed this other trend that they only seem to love individual rights when it doesn’t have anything to do with property, unless it has to do with law enforcement. They make their decisions based on the facts of each case and the outcome they want, instead of principles.
I also know several libertarians who got there from the left instead of the right. They’re always amazed when it turns out we agree on some things. Political ideology goes in a circle rather than a line. Far right nazis and antifa meet when you join the circle with the ends. Libertarianism is at the other side of the circle. (I know the modern four-part graph is better.)