[Loud Mime]

The careful crafters of the Bill of Rights intended the adjective "public" to restrict government takings to uses directly owned by government or primarily serving the general public, such as roads, bridges or public buildings.

The only matter exercised carefully by today's politicians is job security.

Our government was only a few months old when some officials tried to empower government beyond its design. James Madison objected to the attempt:

"If Congress can apply money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may establish teachers in every State, county, and parish, and pay them out of the public Treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may undertake the regulation of all roads, other than post roads. In short, everything, from the highest object of State legislation, down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress; for every object I have mentioned would admit the application of money, and might be called if Congress pleased provisions for the general welfare."

[Huck]

I love and revere James Madison, but man o man he missed the boat on that one. The anti-federalists saw this coming and warned of it. Patrick Henry's arguments to the Virginia House during the ratification debate laid it all out, and Madison argued against him, argued that Henry and the anti-feds were worried about nothing. Madison was dead wrong.

I greatly revere what Madison and framers did, but in my view, they failed, and I believe if they were here they would admit the same. Conservatives constantly talk about the Federalist papers, when really it's the anti-federalists we should revere even more, because they were right. We shouldn't be trying to "conserve" our flawed Constitution. We should be trying to amend it--to fix all the obvious faults, by way of amendment.