Supremes: Fuck you, hippies, and the bikes you rode in on

This isn't about property rights; it's about smacking down hippies and their "sustainability" descendants.

And Stephen Breyer is a moron.

From Salon:

The Supreme Court Monday ruled 8-1 in favor of a private landowner in Wyoming who was fighting to keep bike paths from being built near his house. The decision, according to USA Today, threatens thousands of miles of public bicycle trails.

The case wasn’t about bike paths per se — it was about whether or not the federal government retains its control over land that had been granted to railroad companies once it’s been abandoned.  But the decision undermines a federal “rails to trails” program, threatening the more than 1,400 bike and nature trails it’s created since its inception in 1983.

SNIP

“I certainly think bicycle paths are a good idea, ” Justice Stephen Breyer said during oral arguments in January. The problem, he continued, is that the U.S. government doesn’t have a central database of the land it could convert to bike paths: “For all I know, there is some right-of-way that goes through people’s houses, you know, and all of a sudden they are going to be living in their house and suddenly a bicycle will run through it.”

“The court undermines the legality of thousands of miles of former rights of way that the public now enjoys as means of transportation and recreation,” said Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the lone dissenter. ”Lawsuits challenging the conversion of former rails to recreational trails alone,” she added, “may well cost American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.”

I'm not surprised that Corporatist Elena Kagan went along with Breyer's bullshit, but I am disappointed in Ruth Bader Ginsberg.  Between this and her insistence that Roe v Wade was 'premature," I'm rapidly moving into the "Resign, Ruth, Resign" camp.