First of a three-part series We are a nation of rights, a constitutional republic in which the people demanded a bill of rights as a condition for ratifying the U.S. Constitution.
But during our two-plus-century-long quest for equality, our special interests, our party politics and our struggle for minority rights have caused us to forget that the smallest minority is the individual.
In this way we’ve lost touch with the true individual rights that made America the light of the world, a place able to continually chase tyranny back as we individually go on our own pursuits of happiness.
By letting our individual rights erode into group rights, we’ve allowed an ever-growing government to undermine our individual rights to speech, to property, to self-preservation, and to a having jury of our peers complete with its conscience.
To get back on the path to prosperity, we must understand that our individual freedom requires a federal government that’s restricted to its constitution, as required by the 10th Amendment.
To do this we must start again from the most basic premise — that the U.S. Bill of Rights is a list of restrictions on the power of the state, not a list of positive rights the government can wield as it pleases.
To understand how profound this point is, consider Time magazine’s current cover, which asks if the Constitution “still matters.” Time magazine’s managing editor, Richard Stengel, wrote the cover story.
In it, he says, “If the Constitution was intended to limit the federal government, it certainly doesn’t say so.”
Of course it does say so, but Stengel and the Left think the 10th Amendment (“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”) is irrelevant.
It’s not. The federal government was clearly designed to be a limited government; after all, why even write a Constitution unless to grant specific powers to the federal government?
The Bill of Rights is made up of 10 amendments that restrict the federal government from infringing on the rights of individual Americans and the states.
The First Amendment, for example, doesn’t prevent a restaurant owner from telling a patron to put away his cell phone or leave. The right to the freedom of speech doesn’t bar censorship by individuals on their private property; it only restricts the government from unreasonably censoring speech.
This original intent rests on the belief that government does not grant inalienable rights, such as the right to speak one’s mind, but rather that the freedom of speech is a natural human liberty the government can’t unreasonably restrain.
Flip-flopping the First Amendment into a right the government has created and therefore is required to enforce grants the government the power to define what free speech is and how we may utilize our right to speak.
This topsy-turvy, statist view that many people today accept can be construed to allow the government to decide what free speech is permissible during elections (such as with McCain-Feingold).
It can be used to permit the government to regulate what can be said or allowed on the Internet with net neutrality. This misreading of the First Amendment can empower government bureaucrats to equalize opinions on the radio with a Fairness Doctrine; and it can make the 10th Amendment seem so irrelevant that Time magazine thinks it can boldly claim that the federal government has no bounds its power.
The Bill of Rights was supposed to constrain the federal government to the will of the people, not the people to the whims of government. When we understand this, we’ll begin to win back American Exceptionalism.
Frank Miniter is the executive editor of American Hunter. This is first in a three part series adapted from “Saving the Bill of Rights: Exposing the Left’s campaign to destroy American Exceptionalism” (Regnery, 2011). Reprinted with permission by Regnery Publishing Inc.
