Hey Look, We Found a Marco Rubio Accomplishment! And It’s Pretty Good!

Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) couldn’t name an accomplishment for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fl.), but we were able to find one–and it’s pretty solid.

Rubio wrote in a post in Hot Air in October explaining his fight, as leader of a special committee right before becoming Speaker of the Florida House, against private developers using eminent domain to infringe upon Florida residents’ private property rights right after the Kelo v. New London case.

“The fundamental right to private property has been under assault for years through our government’s abuses of eminent domain,” Rubio wrote. “Eminent domain is the authority vested in government to force the sale of private property. While this authority can be a necessary evil in rare cases related to public development, such as the building of crucial infrastructure, its modern use far exceeds this limitation. Today, it is often wielded by crony capitalist politicians to benefit wealthy and powerful private developers.”

The law Rubio spearheaded to shield private property owners from eminent domain, as National Review‘s Jim Geraghty explains, “limited the state’s authority to seize property and declared that the prevention or elimination of slums, blight, or public nuisance was no longer considered a valid public purpose for the government’s use of eminent domain.”

Rubio points out in his post that his reforms earned Florida an “A” grade from the Castle Coalition, an organization that describes itself as “a nationwide network of home and small business owners that uses activism to fight the private-to-private transfer of property by the government through the use of its eminent domain power.”

“The fundamental right to private property has been under assault for years through our government’s abuses of eminent domain.”

Marco Rubio

The Daily Wire has reported on real estate mogul’s Donald Trump troubling support for eminent domain, which makes Rubio’s strong opposition to this infringement of private property heroic and commendable.