Comment by anon291
Comment by anon291 9 days ago
I'm no longer a resident of Caifornia, but California should use eminent domain to seize the forest land, or just burn it and ignore federal law. What are they possibly going to do?
Comment by anon291 9 days ago
I'm no longer a resident of Caifornia, but California should use eminent domain to seize the forest land, or just burn it and ignore federal law. What are they possibly going to do?
> do firefighters not get qualified immunity when acting in their official capacity?
They do. But torching federal land might be somewhere the federal courts wouldn't find it.
They're going to jail the governor of California? Newsom has presidential ambitions and I can't imagine anything that would make him more popular and appeal to a substantial number of conservatives than defying federal law, risking jail, in order to literally save the state of California from fire.
He'd be the greatest folk hero we've made in a long time.
At some point politicians need to have some chutzpah.
> going to jail the governor of California?
Probably not. But you would see Calfire agents being arrested.
> some point politicians need to have some chutzpah
I agree and also asked the question [1]. As a political stunt, it might work for the individual. But it would also set a precedent most Californian voters probably wouldn't appreciate when it comes to federal land in red states. To say nothing of basically every Californian wildfire funding battle in D.C. being ex ante conceded for a few years.
> most Californian voters probably wouldn't appreciate when it comes to federal land in red states
Liberalism: the fear that someone, somewhere is doing something you disagree with.
But thanks for saying the quiet part out loud. If we want to make progress as a nation we have to literally love ourselves (in this case, our lungs) more than we hate those we disagree with.
>They're going to jail the governor of California? Newsom has presidential ambitions and I can't imagine anything that would make him more popular and appeal to a substantial number of conservatives than defying federal law, risking jail, in order to literally save the state of California from fire.
You clearly haven't seen the political scene in the past decade. Both democrats and republicans have gone 180 on several issues. Democrats, supposedly the stalwarts of bodily autonomy, fully embraced mask/vaccine mandates. Election security (eg. hackable voting machines) went from being the concern of left-leaning techies to a rallying cry of election denying republicans. It's impossible to predict where alliances will lie based on a few principles.
I’m not the OP, but Utah Power & Light Co. v. United States, 243 U.S. 389 (1917) says the state can not seize federal lands. There’s the Supremacy Clause and the Constitution specifically spells out that the (US) Congress has authority over the federal lands.
A state could apply for a license from the Department of the Interior, but no, a state can’t take federal lands via eminent domain. This is long-settled and even a plain English reading of the Constitution makes this pretty clear. There are mountains of cases on the Supremacy Clause that support this.
If California were to use a hypothetical eminent domain to seize U.S. land, they’d have already done it with Moffett Field if only to get the property tax revenue from the Google Gulfstreams parked there.
So the great thing about American politics is that the states can do whatever they want and the feds can do whatever they want and then we can see who did what legally after the fact. In the meantime, the state won't literally burn killing people as the fire wages its path of destruction.
again, we need politicians with chutzpah. Oregon recently arrested federal officials for similar environmental issues. I'm not 100% read up on the entire case, but I appreciate people trying to do what's right instead of armchair governance.
> This is long-settled and even a plain English reading of the Constitution makes this pretty clear. There are mountains of cases on the Supremacy Clause that support this.
Luckily we have a new Supreme Court makeup that might make a more sensible decision when it comes to states literally doing what needs to be done so their citizens don't literally die in infernos.
> What are they possibly going to do?
What are or what could they do? The latter is basically the same as what would be done to you and me running out and torching federal forest. Jail.