From her FOX bio sketch: (Susan) Estrich is currently the Robert Kingsley Professor of Law and  Political Science at the University  of Southern California and a  member of the Board of  Contributors of USA Today. She  writes the "Portia" column for  American Lawyer Media and is a  contributing editor of The Los  Angeles Times. 

February, 2006 -- It happened late in January on the FOX network's  Hannity and Colmes program, with the pretty blonde, Estrich, in her abrasive voice subbing for the absent abrasive Colmes.  The subject was eminent domain, a process by which a government "condemns" private property and takes it for "public" use.  Until recently, I had never seen it used for any other purpose than to make way for a road or a public development of some kind.  A park, a facility to keep equipment, like fire trucks, in a central location.  A place to put a school.  Those sorts of things.

Then, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed an east coast community to take private homes by this process, and turn the land over to equally private contractors who promised to build large scale dwellings, like hotels or condos.  This would raise the value of the land, thus increasing tax revenues to the municipality.  Conservatives across the nation were shocked when the court did it.  They are incensed to this day.  Stupid legal decisions like this are why they backed Thomas for the big court, and now the two new guys. 

And now you know why liberals, who believe in private property only if it's theirs, are traditionally unhappy with conservative judges.  Conservative judges limit the amount of your money and property liberal politicians can grab. And, O lovely irony, one of the U.S. Supreme Court justices who voted for this theft has a summer home in that neck of the woods.  Conservatives in his area have combined to see if they can take his vacation residence from him by the same process. It is the sincere hope of this writer that they succeed, and so give the damn liberal a taste of his own medicine.  With any luck he was born and plans to retire there.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of property

Along with so many other ridiculous decisions by the liberal dominated U.S. Supreme Court over recent decades, this one hammered another nail in the coffin lid of freedom from government. Estrich, it is clear, doesn't understand the constitution any more than she understands the nature of intelligence, which later on the same program she described as something President G.W. Bush lacks. 

(Bush has an MBA from Harvard.  Somebody should tell her that..) 

While questioning a guest expert on tonight's program, Estrich once more demonstrated why she has no business denigrating the IQ of G.W. Bush.  She said that those who challenged the concept promoted by the court in this eminent domain case were demonstrating opposition to democracy.  Yessir.  Susan Estrich, law professor and journalist, on democracy.

Let's repeat that. Estrich the Robert Kingsley Professor of Law and  Political Science at the University  of Southern California  thinks democratically elected public officials should be able to kick you out of your home because they have found a developer who can upgrade the neighborhood tax base.   Not for a desperately needed hospital, you understand.  Not because an earthquake shifted your land, which is now a looming landslide hovering above an orphanage.  None of that.  She is for it if the sole reason is to generate more bucks for the city.

She said that, in almost exactly those words on that program.  I saw and heard her do it, and will gladly testify to that under oath in a court of law.

Estrich is a constitutional expert?

Estrich is a disease.  It is called liberalism   I wouldn't let the woman teach a class in business law, let alone expose any students to her bollixed up, topsy-turvey, bizarre interpretations of  the constitution. 

The Big Founding U.S. Document spends its people time focused on individuals, folks.  It is so protective of the individual, and so disinterested in groups (except one called "citizens") that the liberals like her had to stack the U.S. Supreme Court with six decades of flaming left judges to generate some cracks through which they could drive to accomplish their goals.  Those goals, like killing unborn humans, special rights for members of some groups and this stealing of private property, could never have been accomplished legislatively.  Not a chance.  They had to get their way through the courts.  They had to have judges who would treat the constitution like a ball of clay which they could mold into anything they wanted, and to hell with what the words actually say.. 

Screw the old lady, this is about tax revenues!

And, we now joyously call it out yet again, so no reader will miss our intent  -- Susan Estrich, a member of the school of politics claiming to stand for the poor, downtrodden masses, stands in defence of the Supreme Court decision to take away the home of an 85 year old woman so private contractors can put up a condo and generate more tax revenue for the local government?  A poor old widow on a pension kicked out of her home!  Can you believe it?  It is Dickensian.  Somebody should send Estrich a gold-tipped cane, a waistcoat, spats and a ruffled shirt.  Maybe some snuff, too.

Is she a villain or merely confused?  Here is a pull quote from a recent column. "Since when do poor kids or single mothers or laid-off workers get to educate and inform our elected officials by taking them on trips to spend five days in a fancy hotel chit-chatting and playing golf?" 

The topic was lobbyists.  The latest attempt by her crowd to take a system they fostered, during six decades of nearly unbroken political power, and try to hang it on the people who won the last couple of elections.  

If Miss Estrich can read, she might study her friends.  Union enrichment of  access to legislative power via purchases of cases of books written by important Lefty politicians.  Books with one word printed on most pages, packed in boxes in the union backrooms.  Call those back rooms campaign finance laundries.   A U.S. House of Representatives bank which cashed checks written against accounts that contained no money.  And dinner, weekends and vacations on lobby money?  You think that was missing during the sixty years the Democrats who ran the place defined what was legal?  

Miss Estrich doesn't know that all the graft in that lobby wasn't worth  investigation until somebody else in a different party began to benefit from the largesse?  She teaches law!  At USC!!  Why the hell doesn't she know all that?

And, while you are wondering why the Party now controlling the White House and both houses of congress suddenly became the focus of wads of flying lobby favors, you might ask yourself how Democrats are managing to duck splattering themselves with their own broadsides.  You might even ask if any laws have been broken by the evil Republicans.  You'd think a law professor would be interested in that -- unless she's a Lefty.  They don't need a law to lynch people. 

We are talking hypocrisy, here, folks.  Titanic hypocrisy.  

Now, in the column quoted above, Estriuch spoke quite highly of Arizona's John McCain.  She admires his McCain-Feingold election law.  This means she doesn't know it would have been rejected by any Supreme Court which understood the Bill of Rights.  That is more evidence for my contention, here.  She is not a crook.  She is a bad professor, and like most liberals spends her days immersed in this ignorance, busily paving the road to Hell with the best of intentions.

My advice is when you see her on FOX, or read her byline in the L.A. Times or other publications, immediately doubt everything she says.  Some of it will probably be true by accident, but most will be drivel.  And when she tells you who should be in charge of Ameica?  If you vote for them (her kind, the liberals) because you think the Democrats are the party of the defenseless, you are as blind as she is. 

Conservative Republicans, not liberal Democrats, are telling the big contractors and government leeches here to stuff it.   If you want to have your home taken away from you because some politically well-connected contractor can convince Susan Estrich that the local government will enrich its coffers in the process, in 2006 and 2008 vote for her friends, Democrats and RINO Republicans.

Wear your Mao cap when you do it, just to get in the mood. 

(LL)

© 2006 Oregon Magazine