Not Congress, the President, the Supreme Court, nor even the Constitution grants an individual the right to freely exercise religion. They do not give the freedom of speech or press, nor do they bestow freedom to a peaceful assembly and petition.
The state does not give people the right to bear arms, nor does it grant a right to privacy.
It certainly never gives any citizen the right to life, liberty, or property; it doesn’t even grant its citizens the right to vote.
Only in the Sixth and Seventh Amendment does the Constitution specifically grant citizens rights, such as a speedy trial, the confrontation of witnesses and evidence, the nature of arrest, and the right to an attorney. These are the only rights citizens may enjoy, according to the Constitution, at the behest of the state.
Rather, in the First Amendment, it prohibits Congress from establishing any laws respecting the freedom of religion, press, speech, assembly, and petition.
The Second Amendment orders the government not to interfere with the right to bear arms.
The Fourth Amendment requires that the government not violate rights to personal security and infiltration.
The Fifth (and Fourteenth) Amendment does not grant the right to life, liberty and property—it tells the government it can’t interfere with this right without due process.
Even in the Fifteenth, Nineteenth, Twenty-fourth, and Twenty-sixth Amendments, the right to vote is not granted by their ratification, they simply tell the government it may not deny people of their right to vote based on race, sex, failure to pay a poll tax, or age.
Language is extremely important today, and it certainly was to the writers of the Bill of Rights, which was written “in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of [the original Constitution’s] powers.” They purposefully rejected drafting these amendments in a manner that would imply the states had granted individuals rights—this would invariably imply their ability to take rights away.
Imagine if the First Amendment had read, “This Amendment hereby grants all citizens the right to exercise religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition freely.” If it were so, citizens would be exercising these “rights” solely by permission of the state and not of their own liberty. If the citizen acts on these ideas only by permission of the state, he would be continually fearful of overstepping his bounds.
The framers of the Bill of Rights understood that it was not within a state’s power to grant individual liberties—at least not the state they wanted. The Constitution was never intended to demonstrate its authority by bestowing rights upon its people; it demonstrated its authority by preventing the government from interfering with rights that they believed inherently belonged to the individual. The state was to be a protector of rights, not a purveyor of them.
As for the positive rights the Constitution does allow the government to bestow, they are a protection on the individual citizen as well. In order for the government to reach the point where they may grant those rights in the Sixth and Seventh Amendments, they must first arrest and detain a citizen. Upon this act, and only upon this act, the individual is in the care of the government and is entitled to the standard of care the Constitution sets forth.
Those who advocate for and demand the government fulfill their “right to a job,” a “right to good wages,” a “right to a home,” or a “right to health care,” are really speaking in Redundancies. The Constitution already prevents the government from interfering with their right to pursue all of those things. But to demand that they be provided by the government also speaks in Contradictories, for in order for the federal government to provide, to finance these things, they must interfere with and violate another individual’s freedom.
Barack Obama has complained that the Constitution contains too many Negative Liberties—those liberties that prevent the state from taking action—and not enough Positive Liberties. It seems he has never understood that positive governmental liberties always come at the expense of another’s individual liberties. Negative Liberties, on the other hand, only prevent Leviathan from growing fat with power.
