Once upon a time, there was a little pink house. It wasn’t much, but it was home for Susette Kelo—until the government decided that a cozy, working-class neighborhood wasn’t quite…profitable enough. Enter Pfizer, the pharmaceutical behemoth with grand plans to swoop in, take her land, and bulldoze her house. Why? To build something more, well, stimulating for the economy. You see, the country needed more Viagra, and the government, ever eager to help, decided the best way forward was eminent domain.
Kelo v. City of New London wasn’t just a legal battle; it was a cosmic joke, starring both liberals and conservatives in a bizarre dance. Liberals didn’t want to dive back into Lochner-era “property rights” fanaticism. Conservatives, meanwhile, loved a good development deal—especially if it meant somewhere replacing that scrappy little neighborhood with a brand-new Ritz Carlton.
The court offered up the Bill of Rights like a lukewarm buffet: heighten the scrutiny here, tone it down there. And in the end? The land didn’t become a vibrant economic zone, and Kelo’s house was gone forever. But hey, maybe the government got what it wanted—a chance to turn a profit off anything, including the foundations of a woman’s home. All she had to do was get out of the way.
Why did the liberals side with the conservatives in bulldozing this woman’s little pink house? You’d think they’d rally behind her—feminism, empowerment, all that good stuff. But when it came to Kelo v. City of New London, they clutched their pearls at something scarier than a wrecking ball: Lochner. Ah yes, the haunting specter of the Lochner era, when property rights were given the kind of attention they hadn’t seen since prom night.
Supporting Susette Kelo might have meant revisiting that dark, twisted past where property rights actually mattered. And heaven forbid! So, rather than risk opening that door and finding themselves back in Lochnerland, the liberals decided that letting Pfizer mow down this woman’s house to make way for a few more luxury condos and a big-box store was the lesser evil. Because when faced with the choice between a woman’s home and the boogeyman of Lochner, well, you can guess which one didn’t make the cut.