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| The son-in-law |
President Donald Trump has made his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, the de facto project manager for constructing the US-Mexican border wall.
The project is now a Kushner priority, along with his solving the Middle East conflict.
There is one big problem, however, with his wall project.
The government doesn't own much of the damn land in Texas where the wall is to pass through.
In Texas, the US border with Mexico runs more than 1,200 miles along the sinuous course of the Rio Grande, and nearly all of the land where the government needs to build is privately owned, according to the Texas Tribune.
The son-in-law does not see this as an obstacle. He plans to just take the property by eminent domain.
More than 800 filings to seize private property will need to be made in the coming months if the government is going to succeed, the Tribune reports.
Not even the Army Corps officials are fully on board with Kushner's great land grab.
They have expressed concerns about the kid’s aggressive view of the government’s eminent domain authorities, writes the Tribune. They have told him that they are committed to following established legal procedures which will limit the amount and circumstances by which land can be acquired by eminent domain by the government.
Kushner is ignoring the concerns.
And so there you have it, in addition to Trump's dizzy plan to build a wall to block immigrants who want to come here to work menial jobs, the son-in-law will execute Trump's desire by coercively taking property from private citizens. This is Trump family-style policy. It is whatever is expedient to make Trump look like a successful presidential bully.
Trump and the kid have no idea what NAP means and they would laugh at it if they were told.
-RW
The state didn’t own much of the land in the biggest land grab of all, the interstate highway system. It didn’t own much of the land in another big grab called Urban Renewal or Urban Removal depending on which end of the bulldozer you were on. And then you had the Kelo taking in New London, backed by the Supreme Court, that was meant to blatantly benefit a private developer and increase the tax revenues for the city, which destroyed an old and viable neighborhood forcing people out of their homes. You had old and established communities in the Blueridge Mountains of Virginia that were destroyed in the 1930’s to make way for the Shenandoah National Park.
ReplyDeleteThe use of eminent domain is an egregious tool that has been used by many presidents and other politicians to forcibly take land, homes and businesses from private citizens. Eminent domain is the policy of all presidents. Trump is merely the latest.