Imagine this scenario: your town wants to take your land and give it to someone who’ll generate more tax revenue for the town government. You don’t like that very much, so you refuse, and the town then sues you. The case goes all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which sides with the town.

You now must move off the land you once owned, so the town can take it for someone else.

Is this just a nightmare vision of an out-of-control government? No, this is the new reality in a country whose Supreme Court grants only periodic deference to the words written in our Constitution.

But as bad as that is, imagine how you’d feel if the town then sent you a bill after all that. A bill for what, you might ask? For the back rent that the town now says you owe for the time that you occupied “their” land while fighting them in court.

Sad but true:

The U.S. Supreme Court recently found that the city’s original seizure of private property was constitutional under the principal of eminent domain, and now New London is claiming that the affected homeowners were living on city land for the duration of the lawsuit [which started in 2000] and owe back rent. It’s a new definition of chutzpah: Confiscate land and charge back rent for the years the owners fought confiscation.