I’m referencing how you’re patting yourself on the back for being so incredibly wise and clever that you can see “both sides of the argument”, which is apparently based on a “legitimate Constitutional claim”.
Please expound on why you think he has a valid claim, because it looks for all the world to me like Vinod is about one loose screw short of a full-blown SovCit crazyballs mofo.
Here’s all the lower court stuff, if you want to read the actual filings and decisions:
But basically, he’s just trying to play semantics about “just compensation” in the Fifth Amendment and some of the tests that have evolved around it, boiling down to “WAAAAAH I DON’T WANNA”. If the guy wasn’t insanely wealthy, this would have been laughed out of court ages ago. The only “win” he got was from some bozo rich-kid judge that upheld a property claim based on pre-statehood ownership rights or somesuch, and it got smacked down fast in a higher court (and that judge is getting in hot water with his upcoming reelection, BTW).
There’s no “both sides” to entertain here. He has an embarrassingly pedantic, paper-thin argument that’s super-duper-easy for California to work around even if he prevails in the SC (which he won’t). The guy’s a Trumpian cry-baby that thought money beats everything, and he’s really being pissy about finding out that that isn’t always true.
I fear that he may be right-- either now and the future. A lot of people are excited about the “5th amendment taking” type claims, and frankly, I’m bloody terrified. There’s a big wealth gap in this country, and a lot of people are invested in making sure that it stays that way-- way past the Trump era.
YOUR EARTH WILL BURN-- and there’s nothing, dear peasants, that you can do about it.
He has done so already, but it has gotten lost in the media coverage so I will repeat it. Guvmint is telling him that he has to keep providing a service at a greater level than in the past, and without compensation for the burden. All the other legal arguments are, as he seems to admit, just lawyers being lawyers.
I am all for government taking private property where necessary and where they compensate appropriately. If the government acted in good faith, paid a market price for this road, opened it to the public, and built a bathroom with tax dollars everyone would be happy.
But forcing property owners to provide benefits and services to strangers is just a bad way to go about it. I take a lot of flack for being a liberal against rent control, but it’s the same bad approach driven by political expediency (harder to raise taxes than pass a law making marks do what the taxes would have been spent on).
More importantly, forcing randos to service strangers always leads to the randos doing everything they can legally and illegally to get out of doing it, and strangers to do everything they can to get more services out of the rando.
The strife about this case is a predictable result of the guv’s trying to get randos to do their jobs for them. Just like all the acrimony and duplicitousness on both sides of rent controlled units is a predictable result that would not happen if the guv just raised taxes on the real estate and used it to subsidize rent control.
The world would be a better place if the government paid for what they demand, rather than externalizing costs onto whoever is easiest to fleece. And it’s not just the rich guy who gets fleeced. The beach users are losing access in this deal. Renters lose access under rent control.
Yeah that wasn’t clear. Neither is it clear what part of my post came across as patting myself on the back, or why people with more extreme positions don’t come across to you as patting theirselves on the back. What steps have you taken to check that you aren’t projecting your biases onto me?
I keep thinking, if he agrees that the beach is public, why not just donate that bit of his land to the public, and let the state maintain the parking and access road? He’d be a hero, and be free of all this fuss.
