EDITORIAL: Trump’s defense of eminent domain abuses indefensible
Donald Trump is running for president as a political outsider — and polling well because of it.
But he burnished his insider credentials last week when he offered a rousing defense of one of the favorite instruments of crony capitalists: eminent domain.
Eminent domain allows the government to seize private property for a public purpose in exchange for just compensation. And it's a necessary power to construct needed infrastructure, such as highways.
But the process has been horribly abused to forcibly transfer property from one private owner to another, usually for redevelopment boondoggles. The textbook case was litigated in Kelo v. New London, with the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005 issuing one of its worst decisions ever in upholding such transfers if they might result in more tax money for governments. That decision spawned a state by state rebellion against eminent domain abuses — abuses that Mr. Trump thinks are just dandy.
In an interview that aired Tuesday on Fox News, Mr. Trump told Bret Baier that "eminent domain is wonderful." And he defended that position in a subsequent interview with Breitbart News. "If you were going [to use eminent domain] to rip down a house and build another house, no way. But if you're going to build a factory that's going to have 5,000 jobs, that's entirely different," Mr. Trump said.
No, it's not. It's equally awful. Using government to take a person's property for another person's gain is indefensible.
If Mr. Trump can't understand that, how can he be trusted to reform Washington and, in his words, make America great again?
