Rob Bishop: “when we have the opportunity of bringing tourists to this great Hall, we show them the ceiling, the cameos of all the…”

“when we have the opportunity of bringing tourists to this great Hall, we show them the ceiling, the cameos of all the great lawgivers in the world, two of whom are actually Americans. On the Speaker's left up there is George Mason, one of three people who stayed through the entire Constitutional Convention and then at the end refused to sign the document because it did not include a Bill of Rights. It was important for him because he thought that was the purpose of actually preserving individual liberty for people. I sometimes find it unique that those great Founding Fathers, the people we venerate, Hamilton, Madison, Washington, Franklin, Dickinson, and others, refused to add a Bill of Rights. It was not because they were opposed to individual liberty. They found an alternative form of providing that particular liberty in the structure of government that we have. One of the unwritten foundations of our system of government and the Constitution is the concept of federalism. We eventually did add a Bill of Rights, which is misnamed. It actually should be called a ``bill of wrongs.'' It is a list of things that are wrong for the government to do no matter how many people want to do it. But in addition to that, the Founding Fathers instilled within them a system of structure to preserve those same individual liberties. They realized that increasing the number of competitors of power is more significant than increasing the number of prohibitions listed.…”