Private Homes may be taken for public good

[Bill Stewart]

>>What the hell are all of you smoking?  This court has *talked* about
>>restricting inappropriate use of the commerce clause, but when it comes to
>>*doing*, they're 100% behind 100% Federal expansion *through* the Commerce
>>clause.
>
>Well, ya' gotta a point there. Actually, I WISH I were smoking something.

California's medical marijuana laws allow you to use it for
just about any "medical condition" you can get a doctor to
prescribe it for, and there are doctors happy to oblige.
This set of mostly really bad decisions by the Supremes
is really stressing me out, so I'd better go get something to
help me manage the stress :-)

Eminent Domain decision looks really bad, though I haven't read it yet.
Brad Templeton suggested, though, that the Constitution does still
require just compensation, and that the obvious value of the
property that's taken is not just the value that the
property owner would have taken if he felt like moving out
and selling to another homeowner,
but the value that the private company would have had to pay
to get everybody they're stealing land from to sell out.
So it may still be possible to get paid decently by going to court.

The Medical Marijuana decision, while appallingly bad,
seemed pretty obvious - straight stare decisis from the
FDR-era decision that a farmer growing grain on his own land
to feed to his own hogs was still engaged in interstate commerce,
and therefore subject to FDR's agriculture quasi-nationalization rules.
If the Supremes had wanted to overturn that, they could have
done so (unlikely), or they could have decided that the case
was sufficiently different because it's about medicine and
not just commerce (also unlikely), but they didn't.
That's a problem with activist lawsuits - you need to have
the resources to win, or else you usually end up making the
legal situation worse for everybody than if you hadn't done it.

At first glance, the cable modem decision looks right, though;
haven't had time to read all the fine print yet.