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The New London City Council was convening for its first public meeting since the Supreme Court handed down the Kelo decision. Figuring it was the perfect place and time to kick off its nationwide Hands Off My Home campaign, Bullock and the institute were on hand to lead a rally. Police barricades surrounded City Hall in an attempt to keep the crowd from blocking street traffic. Eminent-domain opponents were everywhere, along with television cameras and reporters. Most protesters were parents and grandparents, working-class people who normally would never show up for an organized rally.

“We’re not here because mom and dad are supporting us while we write our thesis on what’s wrong with the country,” one fifty-six-year-old man from Maine told a reporter. “We’re middle-class Americans who have jobs to go to and families to support and we care very deeply about this.”

A businessman facing the loss of his auto-body shop in Newark to eminent domain said: “We’re here in support of Susette Kelo and anybody who’s being abused by this plague of eminent domain across this country.”

When Susette ascended the City Hall steps and approached a bank of microphones, the crowd cheered wildly. Overcome by the support, she pursed her lips and started to cry. Losers aren’t supposed to get ovations.

“This has never been about money, as some people would have you believe,” she said. “There is no amount of money that could replace our homes and our memories. This is where we chose to settle, and this is where we want to stay. This is America, the home of the free, isn’t it?”

Her words drew cheers and chants of support. Bullock led the crowd in chants of “Let them stay!”

Inside City Hall, Tom Londregan was starting to think the world outside had gone mad. Earlier in the day, members of the U.S. Senate had expressed alarm at the Kelo decision and announced they were introducing federal legislation to give homeowners more protection against eminent domain. The U.S. House of Representatives even passed a resolution formally condemning the Kelo decision. And pundits were branding it one of the worst opinions of the century.

“I thought I won,” Londregan said. “I thought I won. But nobody cares. America doesn’t accept what the Supreme Court said.”

Besides being on the front steps of the building, Susette had been in the morning paper with an editorial. “We will not leave our homes. We have not yet begun to fight,” she wrote. “I will go on every radio talk show, every television show and tell this horror story about how the New London Development Corporation, the City of New London, and the United States Supreme Court are kicking seven homeowners out of their homes.”

Londregan was beside himself. “As a lawyer, what more can I do?” he said, looking back. “I don’t know.”

The Supreme Court had settled the legal dispute over eminent domain. The burning question now was what to do about the seven underdog holdouts that stubbornly refused to accept the Court’s answer. The city and the NLDC wanted to exercise their legal right to evict them, a process that promised to entail physically dragging people out of their homes, including more than one very elderly resident.

Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell didn’t want to see it come to that. She also disagreed with the Supreme Court’s decision and she didn’t think the homeowners should be forced to give up their properties. While her top advisors closely monitored the situation in desperate search of a political solution, Rell let her frustrations be known. Saying she felt like she was fighting five robed justices in Washington, the governor compared the aftermath of the decision to the Boston Tea Party. “Governor Rell strongly believes that the rights of homeowners should not be trampled upon in favor of the advancement of economic-development interests,” her spokesman said.

Determined to avert a street confrontation between the city and the Fort Trumbull residents, Governor Rell called for the state legislature to convene a special summer session to take up public concerns about eminent domain. She also