I recently went back to school. Well, sort of. I’m taking a class called Constitution Alive!, A Citizen’s Guide to the Constitution. During my high school days, teachers never did more than mention the Constitution. In college, I majored in political science and studied the philosophy of government, international relations, international law, and economics but, not the Constitution. There are less than 5,000 words in the entire document. I’ve read longer chapters in a book during an evening but, when I graduated from college I had never read this founding document of my country.

In a constitutional republic, such as the United States, does the government have a right to take your house and land? It may surprise some of you that yes, the government can take your property and, the Supreme Court ruled in 2005, that they can even give it to another person.