Byron York has an excellent article in today's DC Examiner that discusses James Madison and the founder's view on the kind of government Obama envisions for America.

They would not have approved:

In the Federalist Papers, written 221 years ago, Madison addressed the need for a Senate to accompany the more populist House of Representatives. An upper body, he wrote, “may be sometimes necessary as a defense to the people against their own temporary errors and delusions.”

For the times when a political leader would attempt to capitalize on those errors and delusions, the Founders prescribed the Senate, with its members elected to terms three times the length of those in the House, originally chosen not by the people but by the state legislatures. From Federalist 63:

“There are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career, and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the public mind?”

Now is the time for the salutary interference of temperate and respectable citizens, otherwise known as the 41 Republicans in the United States Senate. It is their job to help the president in areas where there is widespread agreement that he should be helped, and hold the line on everything else.

President Obama, his chief of staff, and Hillary Clinton have all now come out and said straight out that they want to use this economic crisis as an "opportunity" to fulfill a wishlist of liberal programs and to remake America into something it isn't. It's not the platform they ran on. It is not what people voted for. But they are doing it because they believe that Obama is popular enough that the people will swallow anything as long as he attaches the words "economic crisis to it."

I think it should be clear to all by now that this president sees economic recovery as a secondary goal to radically changing America. With a war on business, on the free market, on the independence of the American people, Obama is seeking nothing less than a transformation of the United States into something more like a European social democracy than any vision or imagined state our founders thought about so many years ago.

Just because they can do it, they are doing it. A sad reason to throw what America has been out the window.