Policy 7

Resolved, by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, two-thirds of both Houses concurring, that the following articles be proposed to the Legislatures of the several States, as amendments to the Constitution of the United States; all or any of which articles, when ratified by three-fourths of the said Legislatures, to be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the said Constitution, namely:

Thus was born the American Bill of Rights. In order to obtain the votes necessary to adopt the proposed Constitution that would create the United States, ten amendments were added “in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its [the new federal government’s] powers.” Those ten amendments enumerate numerous “rights of the people” that the federal government shall not abridge. Among them are the rights to freedom of speech, assembly, religion and the right to bear arms. Amendment V reads in part “No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, with-out due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”

Our Washington State Constitution puts a declaration of the peoples’ rights right up front in Article 1. Section 16 of that article has a stronger protection of private property than the United States Constitution. It says in part, “No private property shall be taken or damaged for public or private use without just compensation having been first made, or paid into court for the owner.”

The founders of The United States and the framers of the Washington State Constitution understood perfectly well that governments, with their monopoly on armed force, would simply take the property of the people without compensation. Their carefully worded constitutions were an attempt to prevent that abuse and they worked for awhile. But now, at the beginning of this new century, many of the rights guaranteed by those documents are regularly violated by the very governments that were put in place to ensure them. Our right to own and use our property as we think best is assaulted from all directions. Restrictive rules and regulations by the thousands cause grievous financial harm to property owners whose only compensation is ever-higher property tax bills.