The Bill of Rights - Articles IX and X

Note: Friday's post is going up early because I need to go to work early in the morning, and won't have time to write the post when I usually do. It'll confuse Mike, but the rest of you should be okay.

It's been a while, Dear Readers, since we last looked at the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but now it's time to complete our brief foray into history with a discussion of the last two articles of the Bill of Rights - numbers nine and ten (or IX and X, to be numerically Roman about it).

The Ninth Amendment reads,

"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

And the Tenth reads,

"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."

Taken together, these two amendments say quite a bit. Unfortunately, they don't say quite enough.

The Founders wrote the Ninth Amendment because they realized they couldn't think of everything. They had, as we have seen, recent experience of living under a monarch with nearly limitless power, and wanted to make sure that - just because they'd forgotten to list a particular right in the Constitution - that fact couldn't be used by some future President (or legislature, or court) to take on more power just because the Constitution didn't say "no."

The Tenth Amendment grew out of similar concerns. The greatest problem faced by the Founders in drafting the Constitution was figuring out the correct balance between the relative powers of the central government and the constituent states. That argument was resolved by the Tenth Amendment in the states' favor - if the Constitution didn't specifically grant a power to the central government or specifically deny it to the states, it would go to the states.

Or to "the people," whatever that means.

According to the Supreme Court in its Citizens United decision (are you tired of me harping about that, yet?), "the people" includes corporations, unions, and similar groups ... not just Average Joes and Janes like you and I. Nowadays, "the people" are the "oil people," the "mining people," the "banking people," the "real estate people," and so on...

You might want to remember that the next time you're in a demonstration and shout some mindless slogan like "power to the people!"

But anyhow, the last two amendments of the Bill of Rights are, in my opinion, two of the most important. They don't guarantee specific rights like the First through the Eighth Amendments, but they reflect a farsightedness on the part of the Founders that we don't see in the weasely ass clowns that have taken their place today. The Founders knew they didn't have all the answers, so they built into the Constitution a mechanism to allow for the document to be amended as conditions changed in an unknowable future (Article V). And, knowing that tensions between the central government and the states would certainly arise, they wrote the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to underline their vision of a union in which the powers of the individual states would be protected. Somehow, I don't think we have anyone in Congress today who could write a document this good.

Unfortunately, what we have in Congress (and in the noisy fringes of the left and right) are a lot of people who talk up a storm about the Constitution and what they think it says, but don't really have much of a clue what it actually means.

In the coming weeks, we'll look some more at the body of the Constitution and at some of the other amendments. In an election year, I think that's a very worthwhile thing to do.

Have a good day. See you in this spot for Cartoon Saturday!

More thoughts then.

Bilbo