Sunday, February 05, 2006

Bipartisan Effort To Curb Kelo Abuse

One thing that usually makes my hair stand on end is hearing of politicians "working together in a bipartisan manner..." on some issue. You can be pretty sure you'll be getting a double whammy when they get through with whatever they're working on when you hear that. In this case, it seems like a good thing:

Looks like the Democrats have officially jumped into the Eminent Domain abuse fray that came to a head when the Supreme Court ruled for the City of New London in the infamous Kelo Decision. Indeed, folks from all sides of the aisle were outraged that local governments were given the green light to seize land from a private person only to turn it over to another private person for their own private gain.

In California the Republicans took the lead on the issue with State Senator Tom McClintock introducing legislation curbing the abuse shortly after the Kelo Decision was made. According to the Sacramento Bee's Dan Weintraub, the Democrats have decided to help. This is a good thing.

The only unfortunate thing about this issue is there's at least four different ballot initiatives geared toward curbing eminent domain abuse getting ready for circulation so they can be placed on the ballot later this year. It's going to be a real headache to make heads or tails out of which one to support. All the confusion might end up with the good one(s) losing. And that's just four intitiatives out of something like 70 initiatives I understand might end up on the ballot altogether this year. What a pain.

4 Comments:

At 11:40 AM, Blogger Fred Mangels said...

I guess that's one way of looking at it. It's just too confusing when you have competing initiatives supposedly having the same purpose. Those that "care about the issues" as you put it are going to be just as confused as those who don't.

 
At 11:40 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Come on Fred, don't you love 6 pages of voting sheets? I hope there is alot of pages, so the slackers stay at home and let the people who understand and care about the issues go to voting war.

 
At 11:41 AM, Blogger Fred Mangels said...

hmmm...why did my response end up above the question? Isn't it supposed to be the other way around?

Let's see where this comment ends up.

 
At 8:09 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

But Humboldt County opted for the Diebold machines. Why bother voting at all? Plenty of California counties chose better alternatives which actually qualified for federal funds.

 

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