WEARE, N.H. — Just after 9 a.m. Saturday, Brenda Lashway knocked on the door of a burly cable company technician named Bart Eltz. Wearing a "Beer Hunter" T-shirt, Eltz looked puzzled when Lashway asked if he was familiar with the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Kelo vs. the City of New London.
"Well," Lashway explained, "the way it reads now, our property can be taken from us for essentially any use at all."
Within minutes, Eltz, 31, was adding his name to a petition that supports a move to seize Justice David H. Souter's 8-acre homestead here. In June, Souter joined the 5-4 majority upholding the right of governments to appropriate private property for commercial development.
The ruling so outraged eminent domain foes across the country that they decided to get even. Invoking the same premise used by the Supreme Court -- that businesses will generate higher incomes for communities than individual landowners -- they want to turn Souter's 200-year-old farmhouse into an inn to be known as the Lost Liberty Hotel.
The backlash against the Kelo decision has rippled across the country. Talk radio has exploded with diatribes about the distinction between taking private land for public use -- the traditional theory behind eminent domain -- and public benefit, as the Supreme Court advocated in the Connecticut case, where homes were taken so an office park and hotel complex could be built.
In California, lawmakers have proposed at least three bills pertaining to eminent domain since the court's ruling. New Hampshire legislators also are considering several bills that would narrow the state's definition of eminent domain, potentially circumventing the Supreme Court decision. Legislatures elsewhere in the nation also are reviewing laws on the issue. But only in Souter's hometown have protesters marshaled their fury against a single justice.
Logan Darrow Clements, a businessman from Winnetka, Calif., said the hotel idea was part political statement and part pipedream when he proposed it soon after the court ruling. But the scheme gained steam through blogging and Internet chat discussions.
"And then Rush Limbaugh read my entire press release on the air," said Clements, 36. "That certainly helped."
Clements, a follower of the teachings of novelist Ayn Rand, calls himself an "objectivist." Many others involved in the project are Libertarians.
