Sean Hannity and his friends on the Republican right must be furious about the outrageous land grab happening to private American citizens in Nebraska. Wait, what? He’s in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline project anyway? How could that be?
The pipeline’s owner, TransCanada Corp., has now filed an eminent domain action in a Nebraska state court seeking to force private landowners to grant an easement that would permit the Canadian-owned company to erect sections of the highly controversial Keystone XL on privately owned land.
The new filing comes on the heels of a controversial decision earlier this month in which a 3-judge minority of the 7-judge Nebraska Supreme Court were permitted to overturn a lower court ruling that the process by which the state’s Republican Governor Dave Heineman permitted TransCanada to revise the pipeline’s route was unconstitutional. Heineman’s decision was upheld because of a Cornhusker state requirement that state constitutionality be determined by a super-majority of high court’s justices. (The new route was necessary after both the Republican Governor and GOP-controlled state legislature objected to the originally-planned route.)
While the Nebraska Supreme Court’s decision at the time served to shift the immediate focus of the debate back to Washington D.C., where the Republican-controlled House voted for fast-track approval of the pipeline and a similar bill is quickly working its way through the newly GOP-controlled U.S. Senate, TransCanada’s eminent domain filing in the state may prove a major embarrassment to those same elected Republicans. Many of those same GOPers, and their mouthpieces in the media like Hannity, have previously declared fierce opposition to eminent domain abuse that occurs when either state or local entities condemn properties owned by ordinary citizens, where such condemnations primarily benefit commercial interests of wealthy corporations and developers…
Questionable right even under Kelo
In a 5 to 4 decision in Kelo v City of New London (2005), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the use of eminent domain by the economically depressed City of New London, CT to transfer property from private, middle-class homeowners to the pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer via a redevelopment agency. The Court ruled that Pfizer’s promised jobs creation was a “public purpose” justifying the use of eminent domain.
However, the majority added:
The ephemeral nature of the “jobs” rationale was exposed when, eight years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Kelo, Pfizer pulled up stakes, taking with it the 1,400 jobs it had created.
TransCanada would be hard pressed to establish that its pipeline would create a significant number of jobs that would justify the use of eminent domain to seize permanent easements from rural Nebraskans. As found by a Cornell University report, a completed Keystone XL pipeline will likely produce “as few as 50” permanent jobs, nationwide.
In its report at the beginning of last year, the U.S. State Department similarly found [PDF] that “The proposed Project would generate approximately 50 jobs during operations,” a number which, late last year, was finally conceded by TransCanada CEO Russ Girling when he admitted to ABC News that the pipeline’s “actual operating jobs are about 50.”
Hannity must be furious!
Democrats and, especially, Republicans have a very recent public record of standing strongly in opposition to the usurpation of private land via the use of eminent domain.
Following the SCOTUS Kelo decision, Sean Hannity of Fox “News” ran a series of stories about “eminent domain abuse across the United States,” excoriating the government for seizing the private property of U.S. citizens. “Is that the America we want to live in, where you take a person’s home?,” Hannity railed during one of his 2005 episodes. “Sounds like the Soviet Union!”
During the right-wing Cliven Bundy “scandal” last year, as Hannity pretended the scofflaw Nevada rancher was a victim of a government land grab, he lambasted the New York Times for ignoring the “real” issue at stake: “Its reporters don’t have the time or the energy to stand with average Americans being victimized by eminent domain.”
Hannity, however, has been a big supporter of the Keystone XL pipeline, describing opposition to the project recently as “just dumb.”
But its not only right-wing commentators who are having trouble keeping track of their own professed principles. Elected Republican officials who support Keystone XL have also pretended to be furious about eminent domain in the years since Kelo. During an April 18, 2013 hearing on the Republican-sponsored, H.R. 1944, the Private Property Protection Act, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), citing a 376 – 38 House vote in 2005, correctly observed that opposition to the Supreme Court’s Kelo decision cuts across party lines — a point reinforced by public opinion polls reflecting “that well over 80 percent of the public oppose Kelo.”
However, there can be no question but that self-described “conservatives,” claiming to champion the rights of small businesses and those of individual home and farm owners, have been on the leading edge of opposition to the use of eminent domain to transfer private property to corporations. Thus, in her Kelo dissent — joined by Justices Thomas, Scalia and Chief Justice Rehnquist — former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor decried the “reverse Robin Hood” nature of the Kelo land grab. “The beneficiaries,” she observed, “are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms.”
On July 22, 2006, George W. Bush responded to Kelo by issuing an executive order declaring:
To be sure, this matter will be a test for those claiming “conservative” credentials. It’s a test they appear to be prepared to fail miserably.
By assuming the populist mantle — supporting the property rights of individuals, small businesses and family farms vs. corporate greed via their opposition to the Kelo decision — self-proclaimed “conservative” Republicans painted themselves into a corner. They cannot maintain their professed populist principles while advancing the interests of, in the case of the Keystone XL pipeline, a foreign corporation seeking to use the power of eminent domain to seize private easements for private gain.
Not that consistency has ever been a hobgoblin of “conservative” minds.
Whether it’s Hannity, or Bachmann, or LaPierre, or Boehner, or Beck, or Bundy, or Nugent or fill in the fucking blank, these creatures are not stupid….nor insane….nor confused….nor a joke, unless you happen to find goosestepping comical from a certain angle….ALL of these right wingers make perfect sense ALL of the time when you finally get that it’s ALL about the $$$$$$$$$$$$$….like X-ray glasses, you can always see right through these people and make sense of EVERY goddamn despicable thing they say or do by simply following…the…money…..
There now, wasn’t that easy?….crack their Enigma code and they’re as plain and pathetic as the nose on Cheney’s face…..
Politicans and talk-show hosts change positions more than acrobats with ants in their pants.
I think the fact that his is a foreign country trying to get the land that makes the whole thing
even more disgusting.
It is not a “foreign country” that is seeking to seize land owned by American citizens, Joan @3. It’s a “foreign corporation.”
Within the context of today’s neoliberal, global corporate empire, and its right wing mouthpieces, like Hannity and the GOP, the rights of corporations exceed those of countries, their citizens and a sustainable environment.
“If they are capable of being embarrased”
Spot on Ernie.
If the doomsday clock does not embarass them the keystone kops might not either.
Thanks, Dredd @5. However, Brad Friedman deserves the credit for adding that line in the edit.
Thanks for correcting me, it makes me feel even more angry!
No mystery why right wingers idolize Ayn Rand….they see a Goddess where normal people see a selfish solipsistic putain…. it’s… ALL… about… greed… and… $$$$$$$$$$….these people look up at Mt. Rushmore and see four heads of Gordon Gekko….they’ve NEVER gotten over losing the Civil War or WW2…..Scrooge got “bad press” and needed better messaging (and makeup) as a job creator!!….and please, for the love of God, don’t EVER wave a nickel in front of a conservative’s face or they’ll flat out drop their grandchild onto the kitchen floor….
Cognitive dysfunction?
Moral depravity??
Both???
…i’m not a psychiatrist, although i’ve played one in children’s theater, but these righties are massively and perhaps irrevocably fucked up….
Brace yourselves. First all these eminent domain actions will be “Obama’s fault”. By 2016, it’ll morph to being the Democrats’ faul, just in time for the elections.
Hey Brad, not sure if you ever linked to this but it was my first eye opener on what’s/who’s really behind the pipeline. Love me some Greg Palast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P36p-zhhkL4
I understand this is satire; if it weren’t it would be a bit naive. Hannity and those might complain a about land grabs publicly; but action speaks louder than words and it would be quite easy to fix eminent domain legislatively.
Have you seen that happen?
No you haven’t. Because eminent domain is needed so we can build a straight pipeline instead of one that looks like a malaria germ.
Which is what we’d get if we let these little pipsqueaks say, “No.”
Hannity doesn’t really care about eminent domain and neither do any of these other guys. They’re just buying votes with their mouths.
They even figure they can have it both ways with their Hulk-voice speeches: “Keystone opposition … dumb!” and “Eminent domain … bad!”
Coyne Tibbets @11 wrote:
Satire is by no means naïve.
The core issue when it comes to the American Right was summed up for me by my late father when he told me: “Watch what people do. Not what they say.”
The American right’s propaganda, whether it emerges from the lips their talking heads, like Hannity, or within the content of the Koch brothers’ paid-for political ads that have flooded the airwaves during every election cycle since Citizen’s United entails a significant gap between populist rhetoric and the fascist reality of their true goals. The success of that deception has been described by Noam Chomsky as the “democracy deficit.”
Coyne Tibbets next states (emphasis added):
“We”? This pipeline is not being constructed by the American government or at the request of the American people. It is being constructed by a privately-held, foreign corporation that seeks a route for the transport of the dirtiest oil on the planet through the U.S. to oil tankers in the gulf where most of that ecologically destructive fossil fuel will be shipped to Asia.
Eminent domain is supposed to be utilized for public projects, like roads and bridges, that benefit the public at large — not the private commercial interests of the oil cartel.
The real question is not whether the Keystone XL Pipeline would take on “the shape of a malaria germ” but whether it could be completed without seizing easements across privately owned land?
I seriously doubt KXL could be completed absent eminent domain.
I do satire, Fox does farce….i think we all know where to look for the clown shoes, wigs and red rubber noses….
While I’ve not seen this raised in any XL discussion, this is where the liberals on The Court screwed up by finding in favor of the Kelo decision. The shortest version, for those not aware, is that SCOTUS ruled that private entities can file eminent domain claims against other private property owners. There are a few conditions, but nothing TransCanada’s high-priced GOP lawyers can’t get around to get that environmental abomination built.