The Instapundit was ruminating on whether the Eminent Domain ruling would be good or bad for Bush. I can help. It's bad. In all this rush, we've forgotten that Dubya has already profited from just this sort of universally-decried land grab. Remember the
Ballpark in Arlington?
As Nicholas Kristof wrote (9/24/00):
Mr. Bush and his fellow owners even got the local government to seize the property of other landowners and, in effect, hand it over to the Texas Rangers so that they could make a profit on it. All this was shrewd business and a tribute to Mr. Bush's savvy and vision, but critics complain that it is hard to reconcile with his speeches about limited government and private property rights."
The Kristof article is fantastic, full of debate about the general wisdom of building stadiums for professional sports teams. A Bush delegate to the 2000 GOP convention nonetheless called the whole deal "corporate welfare". The Texas GOP platform of the time also said as much. Hell, the national platform did too:
As a politician, Mr. Bush has repeatedly sided with the property rights movement, which aims to protect property owners from government attempts to take land or limit its use. Often this issue comes up in environmental cases, and the national Republican platform this year - which Mr. Bush's aides helped mold - has an entire section titled "Protecting Property Rights."
My spidey sense tells me that GOP spinners will try to convence everyone that stadiums for professional sports teams are clearly Public Use. If that's true, then I'd like someone to start billing John Moores so that I get my cut of the local Padres profits for the year. I don't think that a stadium is any different from the shopping mall mentioned in O'Connor's dissent:
The specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the state from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall or any farm with a factory.
The upshot of all of this is that Bush turned an investment of $600k into $15M, largely by using just this sort of eminent domain to enrich himself and his cronies. There's no way that he can, or should, be able to rail against these practices now. Especially now that none other than Sandra Day O'Connor has all but called him a crook! If the national Dems have any game at all, methinks they should be able to neutralize the story at least. At best they should be able to pin the fear that Your House Is Next onto The Likes of George. Let the Spin Begin!