A candidate in the 2020 presidential race wants the federal government to seize the private property of dozens of Texans under the dubious pretext of a national emergency. I refer not to Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, but to President Donald Trump, whose lack of respect for private-property rights goes back decades.
In the early 1990s, while running casinos, Trump tried to get an elderly widow's house seized so that he could tear it down and use her land to park limousines. In 1994, he urged a Connecticut municipality to take land owned by five small businesses. In 2005, Trump agreed “100 percent” with the Supreme Court's decision in Kelo vs. New London, in which the majority ruled that governments can seize a person's land and give it to a private corporation if they believe doing so will increase tax revenue. And in 2015, while running for president, Trump called eminent domain “a wonderful thing.”
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