I always knew that one day, probably when it was to late, the folks that follow the tea party mouthpieces would one day wake up and find the ungoverned companies that they fought to get the government out of the way for, staring them in the face in a way they would not much appreciate.
I never dreamed it would come so soon. Tea Party activist along with environmentalist and ranchers are fighting a eminent domain action for the TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline in Texas.
The pipeline builder would be TransCanada. They are the oil sands extractor in western Canada. They do not want to call it the TransCanada Pipeline because it sounds foreign doesn’t it. So they call it Keystone Pipeline and this section noted as the XL tract as most of this was built some time ago.
I followed this because I thought it bizarre that a foreign company could use eminent domain to seize private land for its use. But much to my surprise when I found the tea party out with the environmentalist in a protest.
Well as it turns out, to have the power to pull eminent domain in Texas, you are required in your paperwork to “check the box” that you are a “common carrier”. No proof required and no inquiry will be preformed to this fact. You know the standard government-out-of-the-way stuff.
Having made it though the county courts it will now be appealed. They vow to go all the way to the Supreme Court if needed.
The low value oil is only to be shipped to one or two companies but more important, it can be shipped overseas as it will go to a export bay where the oil will not benefit the U.S.
So there you have it. A clear case of the tea party having got the government out of the way and not liking it ! But what about the jobs? What about the government staying out of the way? I hope this gets a little publicity so other tea party folks can see what they have been asking for, in action, firsthand.
The main thing these folks fail to understand, by not being a steward of history, is that these rules you fight to remove were hard fought for in the past by those severely disaffected and those in the fear of the same. Problem is those fighting to remove them probably will not be the ones newly disaffected. Now some blood will have to be spilled “again” to get it back to where it was.
If you want a example, look up the post bank crash – Glass-Steagall Act of 1932 and the repeal in 1999 that led to the banking crisis. Rules they are still fighting to get back in place.