Little Pink House_ A True Story of Defiance and Courage - Jeff Benedict [140]
The point was clear. If a city was justified in taking private land to put it to a use that would generate more tax revenue, where did you draw the line between what was permissible and what wasn’t?
The more Horton tried to articulate where the line should be drawn, the deeper he dug himself into a hole. Before he knew it, he had spent fifteen minutes trying to answer that one question. He had only thirty minutes for his entire oral argument.
The mock arguments exposed the Achilles’ heel of the city’s position. Once you expanded the public-use doctrine from taking private land for schools, hospitals, and roads to include economic development, there was no way to draw a boundary on how far a city could go to take people’s homes or businesses in the name of economic development. It was a point the institute kept stressing in its arguments. Horton and Londregan knew they had to figure out what to say.
Horton’s solution was a practical one—simply change the answer to yes. They should acknowledge right off the bat that it was okay for the city to take land belonging to a small motel and award it to a developer building a big hotel because it would help the city generate more taxes and more jobs.
Londregan bristled, insisting the city wasn’t doing anything like taking land from a small motel and giving it to a big hotel. If the Supreme Court asked that question, he wanted Horton to simply say that the question didn’t really apply in this instance.
“But I can’t tell a justice: ‘Your Honor, the question is irrelevant,’” Horton argued. “You have to say either yes or no. And no matter which one you answer, you’re going to have a problem. It’s sort of like asking ‘Are you still beating your wife?’”
Londregan refused to concede the point. “You tell the Supreme Court you don’t have to answer that question because we do not have a pure taking from A and giving it to B,” Londregan maintained. “We don’t have that situation. We have substantial public benefits and public uses.”
Horton decided Londregan’s answer would end up bogging down the rest of his argument, and he couldn’t afford to spend fifteen minutes trying to explain what Londregan was saying. If asked, he planned to simply say yes.
Londregan didn’t like it, insisting that answer played right into the Institute for Justice’s hands. Horton would be supporting what Bullock had been telling the media and the courts for two years.
“My job is to get five votes,” Horton snapped, “not to win the publicity campaign.”
Divided over what Horton should say, both men hoped the Supreme Court simply wouldn’t ask the question.
Susette had never even been to New York City, never mind to the nation’s capital. When Bullock told her she could bring one person with her to observe the oral arguments, she decided to bring LeBlanc. Although his diminished mental faculties wouldn’t enable him to understand or appreciate the magnitude of the moment, she felt he deserved to be there. He’d stuck by her through the entire legal struggle. She couldn’t see leaving him behind for the best part, even if it meant she’d have to divide her attention between celebrating the moment and looking after him.
The flight to Washington was rowdy. The plaintiffs ended up on the same plane as Londregan and all the City Hall employees and NLDC staff going down to observe the argument. Then both sides ended up at the same restaurant that evening. While people ate, drank, and carried on, Susette couldn’t help questioning if what she was experiencing was really happening. In one corner of the restaurant she could see the NLDC and the City Hall folks. All around her sat her neighbors, an unlikely assembly of blue-collar people who had banded together to try to save their homes. She couldn’t believe they were all just hours away from squaring off in the U.S. Supreme Court.
February 22, 2005
In the