Sotomayer: To Hell with the Fifth Amendment

David Brooks sarcastically applauds the Obama administration’s willingness to cavalierly order banks, auto manufacturers, and health care providers around. And it appears that, in nominating Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, Obama was doing more than finding an Hispanic woman to balance out the court. He was finding someone sympathetic to the idea that government should be able to push around private businesses and property owners.

As Richard Epstein, the nation’s preeminent scholar on property rights and the Fifth Amendment, writes in Forbes, Sotomayer has even less sympathy for property rights than the justices who voted for the Kelo decision. In 2006, Sotomayer was on a panel that reviewed a case known as Didden vs. the Village of Port Chester, New York.

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