[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 18]
[House]
[Page 24429]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1415
            BLAMING WRONG PEOPLE FOR EMINENT DOMAIN DECISION

  (Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts asked and was given permission to address 
the House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, I agree with the previous 
speaker and many of the other Republican speakers that the recent 
decision allowing eminent domain for private economic gain was a bad 
one. But my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are blaming some 
of the wrong people.
  The Supreme Court was not the author of this policy. What the United 
States Supreme Court did in the Kelo case was to allow elected 
officials at the State and local level to go forward with what they 
wanted. In other words, the complaint of my Republican colleagues about 
the Supreme Court in this case is, where was judicial activism when we 
needed it?
  They are denouncing the Supreme Court because it did not overturn the 
decision of locally elected officials. I happen to agree in this 
specific case. But try to square that with their rhetoric in which they 
are talking about activist judges and unelected officials.
  What they are implicitly acknowledging here is that there are times 
when they very much want unelected and lifetime-appointed judges to 
overturn what local officials did, because the case here of eminent 
domain is a case not of the Supreme Court taking anything aggressive. 
As I said before, the Supreme Court does not use eminent domain. That 
building across the street has not gotten one inch bigger since I got 
here. What the Supreme Court did was to allow the local officials' 
decision to stand. That is the kind of lack of activism that my 
Republican colleagues deplore.

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