Constitutional limits

Editor,

James Madison, father of the Constitution, wrote in The Federalist No. 45: “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined.” In Federalist No. 14 he makes it plain that the states and the people are to possess a broad range of power not seen in our country today. In other words, we the voters are the ultimate check on the accumulation of unconstitutional power in Washington.

I will venture to make a partial list of items that Madison would choose to eliminate were he with us today: the Federal Reserve and the progressive income tax which are two planks of the Communist Manifesto, the United Nations, Federal Aid to Education, President Johnson’s Great Society, Medicare, the Environmental Protection Agency, the misleadingly named North American Free Trade Agreement and the internationalist power grabbing World Trade Organization.

Concerning our approach to the so called fiscal cliff, how about returning our government to the constitutional limits of its authority?

Robert J. Lewis
Visalia