The time has come for Congress to address this issue, to redress the wrongs that have been imposed on individual owners by Congress itself and by countless state and local officials. But second, and more immediately, Congress needs also to breathe new life into the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause, making it clear to a Court too encumbered by its past that the clause means precisely what it says when it prohibits government from taking private property for public use without just compensation. Let me address those two issues, the first briefly, the second in somewhat more detail. The federal government, as every student of the Constitution learns, is a government of delegated, enumerated, and thus limited powers. Delegation from the people gives power its legitimacy.
Enumeration limits that power.
Unfortunately, that doctrine of enumerated powers, which the Framers meant to be the centerpiece of the Constitution, today is honored in the breach. Whereas earlier congresses asked first whether they had constitutional authority to undertake whatever proposal might be before them, and earlier presidents vetoed measures for lack of such authority, the 20th- century concern has been to pursue public ends without even asking whether the Constitution permits those pursuits. The result has been the regulatory and redistributive juggernaut that has produced the Leviathan we now call government in America. Because I have addressed this issue in some detail in the Cato Institute's new Handbook for Congress, which was released here in the Capitol and distributed to each member just this week, I will limit myself today to saying simply that if we are to come to grips with the problem of regulatory takings, the first order of business is to start thinking seriously about rolling back many of the regulations that are doing the taking. And the most fundamental way to do that is to revisit the centerpiece of the Constitution, the doctrine of enumerated powers.