The original intent of the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, was to limit Federal power. It was not directed at the states, but at the federal government. The concern of the Founders was that the Federal Government would become the new Crown. It was a legitimate fear, because that is effectively what happened with the Union victory in the Civil War.
Anyway, there are a few restraints on the states written into the Constitution, but the Founders certainly did not envision binding the hands of the states whne the passed the Bill of Rights. It was aimed at the Feds.
With the Union victory in the Civil War, and the necessity of changing the Constitution to override the ability of states to determine what property was - at least when it came to people - and to override states' ability to decide that blacks wouldn't have the same rights as whites - the Constitution was amended three times in the mid-to-late 1860s.
The Southern states, especially, resistant treating the bfreed slaves as free and equal citizens, and so federal power was applied ever more strongly, and the Bill of Rights applied more and more to the states. This has continued to our day.
Obviously this has been necessary.
But we need to be very, very clear, because the strict constructionist view is vogue on the right, and strict construction/originalism CACANNOT be allowed to simply become a subterfuge for "whatever conservatives want", a right-wing form of the judicial activism of the left.
The Bill of Rights CLEARLY did not apply to the States.
THhe 9th Amendment says that, to be sure, but it does not say that the states can't take property by eminent domain: they can. The recourse against these abuses in 1789 would have been against the state, and political within the state. The recourse TODAY is to federal court, because the 14th Amendment has been interpreted by the Supreme Court to apply to the States too. That's all well and good, but if one takes the interpretive approach, then one finds that in Kelo the Supreme Court applied its interpretive power again, and didn't find federal power in the Constitution to overrule the states on eminent domain takings for tax base reasons. If one wants to go back to 1789, the federal courts don't even have JURISDICTION to hear eminent domain cases; one must go to state acourt and argue it under the state constitution.
My PERSONAL view? There's a difference between private homes and commercial property. Taking private homes for other private use, as in Kelo, is PARTICULARLY odious. The SupremE Court said it's a state matter, so this movement to get state constitutions to block this sort of thing is the answer. There isn't a recourse in federal court. The Supreme Court has already said that what Illinois is doing here, it can do. It's up to the people of Illinois to stop it.
Follow the Sunset Hills solution..get rid of those politicians.
Real blight is a discontinuity in the bid rent curve, which politicians wouldn't know if it bit them- additionally, they almost always hire "urban planners" trained as architects rather than economists.
The original states were told to write up their constitions PRIOR, hence reserving their States rights. The majority contained the Bill of Rights. The Feds wanted to insure that those rights would extend to the new states which would come along.
And, as I noted in my previous message, the clear original intent of those amendments (specifically, of the privileges and immunities clause of the Fourteenth Amendment) was to prevent state governments from violating the rights of citizens as described in the federal Bill of Rights.
I agree politically that the best recourse in the issue of eminent domain is in the states, but only because the principle of stare decisis makes reversal in the US Supreme Court very unlikely... but that doesn't mean that O'Connor et al ruled correctly.
Your argument that the original intent of the Bill of Rights was to limit federal power is a weak one. If it were true, the ninth and tenth amendments would have identical purposes. The ninth amendment reserves freedoms not to the state, but to the person, so it cannot be that the founding fathers meant to say, "the federal government cannot abridge these unalienable rights, but the state can."
Your reading of the Constitution is over legalistic; I don't know if this comes from merely trying to point out flaws in strict constructionism. But the Constitution presupposes English common law; the Bill of Rights sought to enunciate that fact. The separation of Church and Nation applied to the federal government; indeed, there were several establishments of religion within the states... And hence, the first amendment begins with "Congress..." However, the subsequent amendments make no reference to Congress at all. In fact, most deal with matters which have to do primarily with state issues, such as prosecutions, and quartering of soldiers (which were then state militias), etc.
If you are going to argue that strict constructionism only recognizes what is specificially stated, then you must acknowledge that the Bill of Rights, in most instances, makes no distinction between freedom from the federal government and freedom from local governments. (In fact, the founding fathers would be aghast at the notion that freedoms are granted by governments, rather than merely recognized as inalienable.) Once you open the door to allow that strict constructionism permits presumptions such as that the COnstitution only applied to the federal government, then you have veered into the territory of originalism, and you must also admit the fact that the Constitution presumes common law, and all its implied rights of man.
In either case, even if the takings clause and the ninth amendment originally applied only to the federal government (which even the New London supporters would disagree with), you have to acknowledge that the fourteenth amendment applied freedoms from the federal government to also apply to freedoms from the state government.