I have been rooting for quite a wile for Justice Janice Rogers Brown to be one of Bush’ first nominees to the supreme court, for a variety of reasons. I admire her life story, I support her views on most matters and I respect her judicial philosophy. I like the fact she is a an average American who worked hard to make good, not a child of the elite monied class.

I felt the recent US SC eminent domain decision had totally disarmed the democrats ability to use the filibuster with impugnity, if the GOP could point to the courts’ decision, claim ‘extraordinary circumstances’ and emphasize the need to get on with replacing justices before too many people lost their property.

Powerline has post that is music to my ears. Turns out our good Justice Brown has judicated an eminent domain case! With this record there would be no stopping her becoming a US SC justice. The case is San Remo Hotel v. City and County of San Francisco. And is excerpted on Powerline, and repeated here:

Americans are a diverse group of hard-working, confident, and creative people molded into a nation not by common ethnic identity, cultural legacy, or history; rather, Americans have been united by a dream—a dream of freedom, a vision of how free people might live. The dream has a history. The idea that property ownership is the essential prerequisite of liberty has long been “a fundamental tenet of Anglo-American constitutional thought.”
…
“Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist”

We need this person on the US SC as soon as possible. And no democrat should even consider challenging her given these statements of record on personal property.

But private property, already an endangered species in California, is now entirely extinct in San Francisco. The City and County of San Francisco has implemented a neo-feudal regime where the nominal owner of property must use that property according to the preferences of the majorities that prevail in the political process—or, worse, the political powerbrokers who often control the government independently of majoritarian preferences.

What I admire in the decision, beyond the broader perspective, is the specific and fundamental problems with what the City of San Francisco did in causing the very problems they were making the Hotel owners correct:

The HCO places the burden of providing low-income housing disproportionately on a relatively small group of hotel owners. These hotel owners certainly did not cause poverty in San Francisco; indeed, for a long time they voluntarily helped relieven the problem by leasing some or all of their rooms on a longterm basis to lowincome residents. But as the economy of the City shifted, this residential use of their hotel rooms became increasingly unprofitable, and hotel owners began to abandon the residential rental business. It was then that the City, facing constitutional constraints on taxation and other sources of revenue, began to see the hotel owners as the most convenient—if not the most equitable—off-budget solution to its housing problems.

Classic politicians. They screw up a place with bad policy and then blame others for not ensuring reality conformed to the theoretical social fantasies…