A Supreme change, perhaps

OPINION

by a not-for-profit legal defense fund, will fight on for years to get a day in court, like Michigan developer John Rapanos did for a decade beginning in the mid-1990s, only to finally reach the Supreme Court and be met with a 4-4-1 decision in 2006 that stops short of enforcing the Constitution’s takings clause.

The court has long turned a blind eye to the havoc dealt to landowners large and small via the obscure declarations of bureaucrats. Rapanos is one of a long line of landowners ground down by a combination of bureaucratic and legal delays.

Complaints about government regulators are hardly new. Recall one of the complaints of the Declaration of Independence, that King George III had “erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”

The king had nothing on the federal bureaucracies and environmental activists. The courts established by the Constitution protect not just freedoms of speech, the press, the free exercise of religion and the right to bear arms but also the right to own property and not to have it taken by the government without a fair price. Yet courts have stood aside, allowing property to be frozen as beyond use, without any compensation.

Perhaps that will change under the new Supreme Court. Perhaps the court will finally defend landowners—small, stretched, bankrupted-by-bureaucrats landowners—from civil servants who declare and depart, who denigrate this right and deny its relevance.

Many, many people have been waiting a long time. Perhaps this is their year.