Over at Prawfs, Eduardo Penalver has an interesting post on California’s recent Propositions 98 and 99. An excerpt:
Insofar as the backlash against Kelo was rooted in the popular views about the special status of residential property, . . . it seemed strange to me that the proposed legislative responses have tended to sweep much more broadly, encompassing all privately owned land. It has always seemed to me that property rights groups were trading on the rhetorical and cultural power of homeownership in the service of a much more expansive agenda than the public reaction to Kelo merited on its own terms.
You can see this manipulation of Kelo not only in the attempt to protect all private land from redevelopment takings, but also in the tendency of property-rights groups to bundle anti-Kelo initiatives with other elements of the property rights agenda, such as the anti-rent control provision of Prop. 98. Of course, to the property rights libertarian, all of these things (Kelo, rent control, regulatory takings, etc.) are related to broader principles about the nature and scope of private property rights, but most voters do not accept those underlying libertarian principles — their reaction to Kelo rested on grounds that were much narrower, grounds having to do with the special status of the home. I suppose in politics there’s nothing wrong about running with a backlash for all it’s worth, but it has always seemed to me that there was room for more targeted legislative responses to Kelo.
I would have voted for Prop 98 myself, but I think Eduardo is probably right that the public opposition to Kelo is largely rooted in the importance of personal home ownership rather than on a broader view of property rights.